For the first time there came upon the windmiller a sense of the fact that it is an uncertain and a rather dangerous game to drive a desperate woman into a corner. His missus was as soft-hearted a soul as ever lived, and for her to sit unmoved by the weeping of a neglected child was a proof that something was very far wrong indeed. One or two nasty stories of what tender-hearted women had done when “crazed” by grief haunted him. The gold seemed to grow hot at the bottom of his pocket. He wished he had got at the stranger’s name and address, in case it should be desirable to annul the bargain. He wished the missus would cry again, that silence was worse than any thing. He wished it did not just happen to come into his head that her grandmother went “melancholy mad” when she was left a young widow, and that she had had an uncle in business who died of softening of the brain. He wished she would move across the room and take up the child, with an intensity that almost amounted to prayer. And, in the votive spirit which generally comes with such moments, he mentally resolved that, if his missus would but “take to” the infant, he would humor her on all other points just now to the best of his power. A strange fulfilment often treads on the heels of such vows. At this moment the wailing of the baby disturbed the miller’s eldest son as he lay in the press-bed. He was only seven years old, but he had been nurse-boy to his dead sister during the brief period of her health,—the more exclusively so, that the miller’s wife was then weakly,—and had watched by her sick cradle with a grief scarcely less than that of the mother. He now crept out and down the coverlet to the wailing heap of clothes, with a bright, puzzled look on his chubby face. “Mother,” he said, “mother! Is the little un come back?” “No, no!” she cried. “That’s not our’n. It’s—it’s another one.” “Have the Lord sent us another?” said the boy, lifting the peak of the little hood from the baby’s eye, into which it was hanging, and then fairly gathering the tiny creature, by a great effort, into his arms, with the daring of a child accustomed to playing nurse to one nearly as heavy as himself. “I do be glad of that, mother. The Lord sent the other one in the night, too, mother; that night we slept in the round-house. Do ’ee mind? Whishty, whishty, love! Eh, mother, what eyes! Whishty, whishty, then! _I’m_ seeing to thee, I am.” There was something like a sob in the miller’s own throat, but his wife rose, and, running to the bed, fell on her knees, and with such a burst of weeping as is the thaw of bitter grief gathered her eldest child and the little outcast together to her bosom. At this moment another head was poked up from the bedclothes, and the second child began to say its say, hoping, perhaps, thereby to get a share of attention and kisses as well as the other.