"And yet it must be their very rarity which makes the idle hours of a busy man seem so peculiarly sweet." Then she turned the subject. "Miss Lloyd is away visiting in Leicestershire, and will not be back for about a week." This she said with her searching eyes bent full upon him.
"So I have been told already," said Jack, drily: but he could not prevent a little tell-tale colour from mounting to his cheek.
Nothing more was said at that time, nor was Miss Lloyd's name mentioned again between them till after that young lady's return.
Jack was very eager that she should return. He chafed and fumed at her absence, but why he should do so he could not have told anyone, unless it were that he thought he could have spent his time much more pleasantly and profitably to himself than in cataloguing the books, and writing the letters, of an unfledged country M.P. But having advanced so far in his enterprise, he was by no means minded to give it up. He would await the return of Eleanor Lloyd even though she should be two months away instead of a single week. He had not yet decided as to what his line of action should be when he should meet her. All that he left to time and circumstance: at present he asked only that he might see this girl about whom so much had been told him, and towards whom he stood in a relationship so peculiar and uncommon.
He was destined to see her sooner than he was aware of.
Always a great walker, Jack found his greatest pleasure, since he had come down to Stammars, in long, solitary rambles along the pleasant Hertfordshire roads, and the more lonely the road, the better he was pleased. As he was posting along at the rate of four miles an hour one afternoon towards the end of January, swinging his walking-stick, and watching the flying clouds, his ear was suddenly caught by a low, plaintive cry that evidently came from somewhere close at hand. He stood still to listen. Presently he heard it again, evidently the wailing cry of a very young child. He looked round him on every side, but there was not a human being nor even a house visible from where he was standing. Once again the cry came, this time louder than before. His eyes, drawn by the sound, concentrated themselves on the root of a large tree, of a tree which grew out of the hedge and overshadowed the road. Between the footpath and the hedge was a tiny watercourse, now covered with a thin coat of ice. Over this Jack strode, and began to peer about in the hedge bottom. He was not long in discovering the origin of the cry that he had heard. In a sort of tiny recess formed in part by the gnarled roots of the tree, and in part by the close-woven shoots of the hedge, lay a child--a child of apparently some six months old, with a tiny, pinched face, and dark, serious eyes, that gazed up wonderingly at Pomeroy for a moment and then filled with tears.
"A pleasant predicament truly!" muttered Jack to himself. "There must surely be somebody belonging to it close by."
He swung himself up on to the root of the tree, and took a long, steady look round. The point where he now was was exactly on the crown of a small hill. Right and left of him the road dipped down into a valley with bare, treeless fields on either side. Nowhere was there a human being visible: had there been one he could hardly have failed to see it. The child had evidently been deserted--left there to be found by chance, or otherwise to die.
When Jack had satisfied his mind on this point he dropped quickly from his perch, flung his stick over the hedge, picked up the child as tenderly as he knew how, stepped lightly across the brook, and set off on his way back to Stammars--a three miles' walk. He felt very awkward indeed, and was possessed by an acute sense of the ludicrous appearance he must have presented had anyone been there to see him, which fortunately there was not. The child seemed wrapped up warmly enough, its outside covering being an old black skirt of some cheap material. Whether it were a boy or a girl, Jack had no skill to judge, nor was that a point which had much interest for him. That strange, serious look in its eyes troubled him a little; but when, after it had finished its examination of him, a wintry smile flickered over its little white face, while it seemed to nestle nearer to him, he could not keep his arms from folding themselves still more closely round it.
The difficulty that now presented itself to Jack's mind was how to dispose of the child. It would never do to take the little waif to Stammars: Lady Dudgeon would have been horrified: and yet Jack shrank instinctively from the thought of leaving it to the tender mercies of the workhouse authorities, although that was clearly the proper thing to do. He was still debating the question, when he heard the noise of wheels behind him. He turned instinctively, and to his great dismay saw a pony phaeton coming rapidly along the road, driven by a youth in livery, beside whom was seated a lady--whether young or old Jack could not yet tell--but evidently well wrapped up in furs. The hot colour rushed to his face. What should he do? What indeed could he do? There was no bye-lane up which he could slink--no stile through which he could wriggle, and so put the shelter of the thick hedge between himself and the road; and it was quite evident that he could not leave the child on the footpath and take to his heels. All that he could do was to pull his hat savagely over his brows, set his teeth, and march stubbornly on, as if it were the most natural and proper thing in the world for a gentleman in a fashionable overcoat and kid gloves to be strolling along a country road in the middle of the afternoon, hugging a baby--and not a nicely dressed baby either--and acting generally the part of a nursemaid.