The other man’s brat troubled her now, for she could not escape from what seemed to her an absurd desire that it should be Lovel’s. The Scouring had taken place in May; it was now December, so that she was approaching her seventh month,--but Lovel must not know that: he must think her only in the sixth month, for the incident with Olver in the barn had happened in June; she must always be careful to remember that, or the whole fabrication would be ruinously exposed. She must run the risk of incomplete preparations,--a misled midwife, a probably unavailable doctor should things go wrong. The resented child moved now vigorous within her; she had a full-blown appearance without which she still thought in her naïveté that she might have been attractive to Lovel. In the autumn his bitch had whelped, and she had watched with real anguish his tenderness towards the blind crawling puppies in their wooden box, and later his patient hands teaching them to drink as they crowded round and blew bubbles in the bowl of milk, and later still, when they grew into fluffy balls, cuffing one another and snarling in their small rage, she watched him dangling old cotton-reels for their amusement, or saw him cross the kitchen with the little pack prancing after him, and was shrewd enough to recognise that this was the first thing which had given him pleasure for many months. Now, when he was out at work, she watched them tumbling over each other on the flags of the kitchen, staggering on their still uncertain legs, and the longing grew within her that they should be babies instead, fat babies, hers and Lovel’s, and the more she longed for this the less she welcomed the child that struck so strongly against her flanks. It should be a hearty child, conceived in laughter of healthy parents, a child that would lie content and kick and crow; a little ploughboy; but already she dreaded to see it with Lovel,--would he touch it with his hands that were so light and loving to train and fondle all young things? or would he avert his eyes from it? would it grow up to toddle always after him in preference to any one else, while he endured it between pity and loathing, and would it call him father, poor fraudulent little stranger in a house where it had no right? Only in one degree less did she speculate over Olver’s attitude towards it,--Olver who was being passed off as its father,--would he believe himself the father or did he know better? and would he croon in his odd slanting way over the cot, with a grotesque affection? and would he later try to win over the child and fill its head with queer lore? and here a fire of maternal protectiveness and indignation flamed through her, rising suddenly from the depth, as she discovered that she was not willing that her child should come under the influence of Olver. There were endless possible groupings to be foreseen about the tiny, dangerous, controversial person of the child.