Bessie was singing to her baby (words and tune springing to her mind in a moment) when suddenly she heard sounds from outside. They were the rattle of cart wheels and the clatter of horse's hoofs on the cobbles of the "street." Dan Baldromma had come home! Her heart seemed to stop its beating. She blew out her candle and listened, scarcely drawing breath. She heard her step-father tipping up his stiff-cart and then shouting at his horse as he dragged off its harness in the stable. After that she heard him coming into the house and throwing his heavy boots on to the hearthstone. Then she heard the thud, thud, thud of the old man's stockinged feet on the kitchen floor--he was about to come upstairs. At that moment the child, who had been asleep on her arm, awoke and cried. Only a feeble cry, half-smothered by the closeness of the little mouth to her breast, but in Bessie's ears it sounded like thunder. If her step-father heard it, what would he do? Involuntarily, and before she knew what she was doing, she put her hand over the child's mouth. Then thud, thud, thud! Dan Baldromma was coming upstairs. Bessie could hear his thick breathing. He had reached the landing. He seemed to stop for a moment outside her door. But he passed on, went up the second short flight, pushed open the door of her mother's room and clashed it noisily behind him. Then Bessie drew breath and turned back to her child. She was shocked to find that in her terror she had been holding her trembling hand tightly down on the child's mouth. It had only been for a moment (what had seemed like a moment), but when she took her hand away and listened, in the throbbing darkness, for the child's soft breathing, no sound seemed to come. With shaking fingers she lit her candle again, and then held the light to the baby's face. The little, helpless, innocent face lay still. "Can it be possible .... no, no, God forbid it!" But at length the awful truth came surging down on her. She had killed her child. II When Bessie awoke the next day the sun was shining on her eye-lids from the skylight in the thatch. She had some difficulty in realising where she was. Before opening her eyes she heard the muffled lowing of the cows in the closed-up cow-house, and had an impulse to do as she had done in earlier days--get up and milk them. At the next moment she heard her mother's shuffling step on the kitchen floor, and then the tide of memory swept back on her. But she was a different woman this morning. She had no remorse now, no qualm, no compunction. What she had done, she had done, and after all it was the best thing that could have happened--best for her, best for Alick, best for everybody.