'That baby that was found in the garden,' Jane said in such a curiously uninterested tone of voice that he could not resist glancing round at her; but she was just then engaged in that mysterious process of 'stroking the gathers,' which the intelligent feminine reader will understand requires a certain attention. If this indifference were assumed, Jane Sands was a much better actor and a more deceptive character than he had believed possible; if she were too entirely absorbed in her own people to give even a thought to her young mistress's baby, she was not the Jane Sands he thought he had known for the last twenty years. The only alternative was that she knew nothing about the baby having been left on his door-step, nor of the meeting with his daughter in the churchyard which had preceded it. What followed convinced him that this was the case, though it also a little favoured the other hypothesis of her selfish absorption in her own people. 'Perhaps,' he said, 'you could look out some of those baby things up-stairs if there are any left.' 'What? I beg your pardon, sir. What did you say?' 'Those baby clothes up-stairs that you gave to your sister's baby.' 'Those!' she said, with a strange light of indignation in her eyes, more even than you would have expected in the most grasping and greedy person on a proposal that something should be snatched from her hungry maw and given to another. 'Those! Little Miss Edith's things! that her own mother made and that I 've kept so careful all these years in case Miss Edith's own should need them!' You see she forgot in the excitement of the moment that these were the very things she had been giving away so freely to that common little child at Stokeley; but women are so inconsistent. 'Well?' he said, as her breath failed her in this unusual torrent of remonstrance. 'Why not?' 'For a little gypsy child! a foundling that nobody knows anything about! Don't do it, master, don't! I couldn't abear to see it. Here, let me get a bit of print and flannel and run together a few things for the child. I 'd rather do it a hundred times than that those things should be given away--and just now too!' It was very plain to Mr Robins that she did not know; but all the same he was half inclined to point out that it was not a much more outrageous thing to bestow these cherished garments on a foundling than on her sister's baby; but she was evidently so unconscious of her inconsistency in the matter that he did not know how to suggest it to her. 'I 'm going into Stokeley to-morrow,' she went on, 'and if you liked I could get some print and make it a few frocks. I saw some very neat at fourpence three-farthings that would wash beautiful, and a good stout flannel at elevenpence. Oh! not like that,' she said as he laid a finger on some soft Saxony flannel with a pink edge which lay on the table. 'Something more serviceable for a poor person's child.'