“Bless you, no, ma’am! Set up long-clothes babies with fashions!”
“Mary, would you be good enough to get me a pretty basket?”
“You couldn’t have a prettier one than this one, ma’am,” said Mary, pulling out the old lace and muslin one that had held the belongings of her own baby children.
Mrs. Waring took up the thing and examined it curiously, and thought of the awe with which she used to regard it.
“Do babies nowadays use these things?” she asked.
“Lord, ma’am, yes, and will till the millennium.”
Mrs. Waring put the little things in delicately, one by one.
“Now, Mary, I will take them to my daughter,” she said with a little quiver of her lips.
She knocked gently at her daughter’s door.
As it happened she could hardly have come at a worse time. Gwen had just escaped from her father; besides, for three weeks now, there had come no news from Strange, and in spite of herself she was all on edge with unnamed terrors.