For answer the woman rose, and passing into the inner room of the cottage, in less than a minute returned, bearing in her arms a little girl, apparently about two years old, whose bright, rosy cheeks, and eyes evidently distressed by the vivid sunlight, gave unmistakeable tokens of having been roused out of a sound sleep. Alice possessed a thorough woman’s love of children, leading her to consider ugly ones pretty, and pretty ones “little angels;” so she immediately took this particular duodecimo angelic specimen on her knee, and won its celestial affections by allowing it to play with her watch, and a bunch of miscellaneous rubbish attached thereunto, and denominated, on the _lucus a non lucendo_ principle, a chatelaine. This reinforcement of infantry having completely won the day (the “dear” sleeping baby had been a powerful, unconscious advocate of its parent’s cause), Alice began to consider how best she could assist the distressed mother. The first point was to learn to whom to apply in favour of the culprits, and she accordingly inquired on whose land they had been taken, and in whose service the wounded gamekeeper resided? The answer was at the same time embarrassing and satisfactory. Of course, if the offence had been committed upon her husband’s property, he could, if he would, decline to prosecute the offenders--if he would?--there lay the difficulty. Alice was well aware of the serious light in which Harry regarded the crime of poaching; and the attack on the gamekeeper even she was forced to reprobate; but if it should prove that the man was not seriously injured, she trusted to her newly-regained influence to enable her to place the matter in such a light that Harry would agree with her in overlooking the culprit’s offence for the sake of his family; or, at all events, if that was expecting too much of his penitence, she had only to ask it as a personal favour, and he surely could not refuse her. So, carried away by her feelings of kindly sympathy, and acting on the impulse of the moment, she put forth all her powers of consolation, and ended by disclosing her name, and the relation in which she stood towards that persecutor of poachers, Harry Coverdale, at the same time promising to use her influence, which she represented as all-powerful, to screen the culprits from the effects of their misdemeanors.