CHAPTER IV.
A QUIET LIFE.
In the night, while the men were seeking the murdered child, there were kindly women who went to the house of the farmer Day to tend his wife.
The elder children had been found asleep in a field, where, after wandering a little while, they had succumbed to the influence of some drug, which had evidently been given them by the mother to facilitate her evil design.

She herself, poor woman, had grown calm again, her frenzy leaving her to a duller phase of madness.

That she was mad no one doubted.

How long she might have been walking in the misleading paths of wild fancy, whether her insane vagaries had been the cause or the result of her husband's churlishness, no one knew.

The husband was a taciturn man, and appeared to sulk under the scrutiny of the neighbourhood.