Page:Cuthbert Bede - The White Wife.djvu/32

Rh case, he would turn her and her babe out of doors, yet he softened to her, now that he knew how grossly she had been deceived by her lover, and he tended her with all the care that her mother would have shown to her, had she been alive.

As Christmas Day passed and New Year's Day drew on, the young mother slowly gathered strength; but, while she did, she also appeared to be settling her mind to some conviction on which she was pondering day after day. What this was could only be conjectured; for she never confided it to her father or to any living being. But, whatever it may have been, this only is certain, that in the grey mist of the early morning of New Year's Day—that day on which the father of her babe was to be married to another—she quietly let herself out of the house, without disturbing her father, and, with her child in her arms, took her way towards the farmer's house. I cannot tell whether or no her purpose was to go thither and obtain an interview with her lover, and, with her own and their babe's eloquence, to plead with him to do his duty by her, and not to stain himself