asked.
"'Don't I!' he cried. 'I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this.'
"'He won't frighten her any more,' I said.
'He is dead.'
"He struck with his stick at the mud.
"'And there's the child.'
"Then, after thinking deeply for a while--"'I don't know that it isn't for the best.'
"That's what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his im-age as utterly gone from her mind as his lithe and striding figure, his carolling voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to ex-cite her imagination into a passion of love or fear;and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is 'Amy Foster's boy.' She calls him Johnny--which means Little John.
"It is impossible to say whether this name re-calls anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her hanging over the boy's cot in a very passion of maternal tenderness. The lit-tle fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, with his fluttered air of a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one--the father, cast out mysteriously by the sea to perish in the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair."End