Mrs Gray went maundering on, as her manner was, interspersing her narrative with baby nonsense and endearments, and Mr Robins forgot his errand, which was, after all, only a pretext, and stood half-listening, and more than half back in the old days of memory, and once he so far forgot himself as to snap his fingers at the child, and touch one of its warm, little hands, which immediately closed round his finger with a baby's soft, tenacious grasp, from which it required a certain gentle effort to escape. 'A pleasant, chatty sort of man the organist,' Mrs Gray said, having talked nearly all the time herself, with only a word or two from him now and then as reply; 'and not a bit of pride about him, let folks say what they like. Why, he stopped ever so long and had a deal to say; and there, Bill, you just run down with the book, as he went off after all without it.' Mr Robins went home slowly across the fields in a curiously softened frame of mind. Perhaps it was the soft west wind, fragrant with sweet spring scents of cowslips and cherry blossom, or the full glad sunshine on all the varied green of tree and hedge, a thousand tints of that 'shower of greennesses' poured down so lavishly by the Giver of all good things; perhaps it was the larks springing up from the clover in such an ecstasy of song; or perhaps it was the clasp of a baby's hand on his finger. He noticed the spring beauty round him as he had not noticed such things for many a day, stooping to pick a big, tasselled, gold-freckled cowslip, and stopping to let a newly-fledged, awkward, young bird hop clumsily out of the way, with a sort of tenderness and consideration for young things unusual to him. His mind was more at rest than it had been for the last three weeks. The baby's crowing laughter seemed to drive out of his memory the wailing cry and the hollow cough and the sad, beseeching voice saying 'Father,' and then the pitiless beating rain, which had been haunting him for the last three weeks. The sight of the baby, loved and cared for, had taken away a misgiving, which he had hardly been conscious of himself. After all, he had not done badly by the child. Mrs Gray was a kind motherly sort of body, and used to babies, which Jane Sands was not, and she would do well by the child, and he himself could see, without any one being the wiser, that the child did not want for anything, though he would not be held responsible in any way for it. CHAPTER V. Jane Hard at Work--Clothes for the Baby--Jane Returns--Jane Singing over her Work--Jane's Selfish Absorption--For a Poor Person's Child--The Organist in Church