The exchange from the girl-mother's arms to the younger arms extended eagerly to receive their burden was effected silently. Prudence walked on proudly, bearing her unaccustomed charge with a sense of new responsibility suddenly acquired. She loved the feel of the little warm body against her heart; the nestling pressure of this soft helpless thing, which lay so confidingly within the shelter of her arms, roused in her the strong protective maternal instinct which is every woman's heritage. In her pity for its puny helplessness she forgot the sense of shock which the first glimpse of the repellently ugly wrinkled face had occasioned her, forgot the circumstances of its unfortunate birth, and the more recent revelation that it had not been received into the Church, was not in any sense of the term a Christian; she realised only that she held in her arms that most wonderful of all things, a new generation; and felt in her heart the warm glow of protective love for this weak little morsel of humanity, born into an unwelcoming world--a love child who was denied love. The unfair conditions of the child's birth awoke her utmost compassion. She felt resentful against its unknown father, against the injustice of the world's judgment, which throws discredit on maternity rather than on illicit love. The greatest crime of this unwedded mother, Prudence recognised, lay in the fact that she had brought a child into the world. "He must be a great comfort to you," she said gently. "A baby makes up for a lot." Bessie Clapp laughed harshly. "Ban't many as think like you," she said. "They wouldn't agree with you at Court Heatherleigh." And Prudence, thinking of Agatha, and Matilda's pink shocked face, of brother William's austere principles, and her father's cold disapproval at the mere mention of Bessie's name, could not contradict this. They would have been scandalised, and she knew it, could they have seen her walking with this outcast, and carrying the outcast's baby in her strong young arms. CHAPTER TWELVE. The meeting with Bessie Clapp set Prudence's mind working in new directions. She realised, with an immense pity and a growing wonder for the complexities of human emotions, that this girl, whose motherhood had come to her in circumstances which the world surrounds with contumely and disgrace, had no love for the child of her unlawful passion. She had allowed Prudence to discover that. But for the fear of consequent punishment, she had admitted with bitterness that she would do away with the baby. She confessed too to a hatred of its father.