'Oh! you can't refuse to take her! See, I'll carry her as far as the door so that Jane can take her, and then I 'll go clear away and never come near her again. You 'll have her christened, won't you? I 've been thinking all the weary way what she should be called, and I thought, unless you had a fancy for any other name' (a little stifled sigh at the thought of how dear one name used to be to him), 'I should like her to be Zoe. Just when she was born, and I was thinking, thinking of you and home and everything, that song of yours kept ringing in my head, "Maid of Athens," and the last line of every verse beginning with Zoe. I can't remember the other words, but I know you said they meant "My life, I love you;" and Zoe was life, and I thought when I'm gone my little girl would live my life over again, my happy old life with you, and make up to you for all the trouble her mother's been to you.' She stopped for want of breath and for the cough that shook her from head to foot, and at last he turned; but even in that dim light she could see his face plainly enough to know that there was no favourable answer coming from those hard set lips and from those cold steady eyes, and her hand dropped from his arm even before he spoke. 'You should have thought of this five years ago,' he said. 'I do not see that I am called upon to support Martin Blake's family. I must trouble you to let me pass.' She fell back against the trunk of the yew-tree as if he had struck her, and the movement caused the baby to wake and cry, and the sound of its little wailing voice followed him as he walked down the path and out into the road, and he could hear it still when he reached his own garden gate, where through the open door the light shone out from the lamp that Jane Sands was just carrying into his room, where his supper was spread and his armchair and slippers awaited him. In after days, remembering that evening, he fancied he had heard 'Father' once more mingling with the baby's cry; but he went in and shut the door and drew the bolt and went into the cheerful, pleasant room, leaving outside the night and the child's cry and the black shadow of the church and the yew-tree. It was only the beginning of the annoyance, he told himself; he must expect a continued course of persecution, and he listened, while he made a pretence of eating his supper, for the steps outside and the knock at the door, which would surely renew the unwarrantable attempt to saddle him with the charge of the child. He listened too, as he sat after supper, holding up the newspaper in front of his unobservant eyes; and he listened most of the night as he tossed on his sleepless pillow--listened to the wind that had risen and moaned and sobbed round the house like a living thing in pain--listened to the pitiless rain that followed, pelting down on the ivy outside and on the tiles above his head, as if bent on finding its way in to the warm comfortable bed where he lay.