The doctor had been and gone, the neighbours had been cleared out ruthlessly, and Tom Wycombe sat content once more beside the calmly sleeping child. Her pretty rings of soft brown hair lay curling over the white pillow, or creeping against her rich little sunburnt face, where even now the fresh red colour glowed so warm and healthfully. Ruddy lips were parted by a gentle breathing, and heavy lids with long lashes veiled eyes that even Tom Wycombe, who was no poet, could have told were blue in the waking as the blue sea beyond the green marsh-land. Every one said that Daisy was the prettiest child in the village as her mother had been its handsomest woman, in her different style. Well enough had Tom Wycombe been aware of this latter fact, and surprised enough, too, that Milly Moss had agreed to take him for a mate—older than she and plain as he was—when there were so many lads sighing around her. Twice he had asked and twice had been refused, but the third time she had consented, and he had asked himself no questions of why or wherefore, but had simply rejoiced in his luck. And she had been a good wife: a bit quiet—as, indeed, she had always been with him, even before marriage—but always dutiful, and he loved her as the working man is not always inspired to love his wife, and did all in his power to make up to her for the one disappointment of those happy years of wedded life—the disappointment of childlessness. Then at last a little one had come to them, and with her coming the mother had died. At first he had scarce wished for the sight of the child who had cost him his wife; but as that feeling slowly faded, it gave place to just as ardent a worship of the babe who was wife and daughter in one to him, and he adored her blindly as he had adored the mother, and lived for nothing else. She stirred now, and he sprang to her side. One dimpled brown arm was flung over the white coverlet and the other fat hand pushed the golden-brown curls off the forehead. Then those blue eyes—blue as speedwells in the spring hedges—opened wide, and when they lighted on him the red mouth smiled. “Dad—I be too ’ot,” said she. “’Ot,” echoed he, alarmed, feeling her brow as the most careful mother would have done. “May be ye’ve too many bed-clothes on. Ye see, ye was cold when we put ye to bed.” And he pulled the padded quilt off her. “Yes,” said she, “I know, ’cos I tummled into the river. It _was_ cold. ’Oo pulled me out, Dad?” “Why, I did, o’ course,” replied the man jealously. “’Oo else should? But little girls mustn’t run away from their Daddies so far another time and get playin’ by nasty rivers.” “Tain’t a nasty river,” said the child, “I like it. But I won’t go tummling in no more, Dad. ’Cos it frights ye, don’t it?” “It do!” agreed the man fervently.