year, after the Foresters' dinner at the Heart of Oak. There was a
difference, too. A little too much drink made the windmiller
peevish and pompous, but just now he spoke in a kindly, almost
conciliating tone.

"See, missus! Let this good lady dry herself a bit, and get warm,
and the little un too."

A woman--ill-favored, though there was no positive fault to be found
with her features, except that the upper lip was long and cleft, and
the lower one very large--came forward with the child, and began to
take off its wraps, and the miller's wife, giving her face a hasty
wipe, went hospitably to help her.

"Tst! tst! little love!" she cried, gulping down a sob, due to her
own sad memories, and moving the cloak more tenderly than the woman
in whose arms the child lay. "What a pair of dark eyes, then! Is't
a boy or girl, m'm?"

"A boy," said a voice from the door, and the miller's wife, with a
suppressed shriek of timidity, became aware of a man whose entrance
she had not perceived, and to whom she dropped a hasty courtesy.

He was a man slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness
made him seem taller. An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as
to protect him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume
beneath it, after the fashion of the day. Waistcoats of three
kinds, one within the other, a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted
stock, were to be seen, though he held the ends of the old cloak
tightly across him, as the wind would have caught them in the