foreseen such an absurd event?"

Poor Mrs. Glynde looked distressed. She was a thin little woman, with an
unsteady head, physically and morally speaking; full of kindness of
heart, sentimentality, high-flown principles, and other bygone ladylike
commodities. Her small, eager face, of a ruddy and weather-worn
complexion--as if she had, at some early period of her existence, been
left out all night in an east wind--was puckered up with a sense of her
own negligence.

She tried hard, poor little woman, to take a deep and Christian interest
in the welfare of her neighbours; but all the while she was conscious of
failure. She knew that even at that moment, when she was sitting in her
small arm-chair with clasped, guilty hands, her whole heart and soul were
absorbed beyond retrieval in a small bundle of white flannel and pink
humanity in a cradle upstairs.

The Rector had dropped his weekly review upon his knees and was staring
at her angrily.

"I really can't tell," he continued, "what you can have been thinking
about to let such a ridiculous thing come to pass. What are you thinking
about now?"

"Well, dear," confessed the little woman shamedly, "I was thinking of
Baby--of Dora."

"Thought so," he snapped, with a little laugh, returning to his paper
with a keen interest. But he did not seem to be following the printed
lines.