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.