“Ah, well,” she said, “you’ll have your baby by-and-by.”
“Ay, if it lives,” the other woman answered moodily—“if it lives. And,” she continued in a whisper, with her scared eyes on Henrietta’s face, and her hand on her wrist, “if I live, miss.”
“Oh, but you must not think of that!” the girl protested cheerfully. “Of course you will live.”
“I’ve mostly nought to do but think,” Tyson’s wife answered. “And I think queer things—I think queer things. Sometimes”—tightening her hold on Henrietta’s arm to stay her shocked remonstrance—“that he does not wish me to live. He’s at the house on the shoulder—Hinkson’s, the one you passed—most nights. There’s a girl there. And yesterday he said if I was lonely she should come and bide here while I laid up, and she’d be company for me. But”—in a wavering tone that was almost a wail—“I’m afraid!—I’m afraid.”
“Afraid?” Henrietta repeated, trembling a little in sympathy, and drawing a little nearer the other. “Of what?”
“Of her!” the woman muttered, averting her eyes that she might watch the door. “Of Bess. She’s gypsy blood, and it’s blood that sticks at nothing. And she’d be glad I was gone. She’d have him then. I know! She made a sign at me one day when my back was turned, but I saw it. And it was not for good. Besides——”
“Oh, but indeed,” Henrietta protested, “indeed, you must not think of these things. You are not well, and you have fancies.”
Mrs. Tyson shook her head.
“You’d have fancies,” in a gloomy tone, “if you lived in this house.”
“It is only because you are so much alone in it,” the girl protested.