General Dunmaw's.
Miss Kitty was glad on the whole. She felt nervous, but ready for a
renewal of hostilities. Several clinching arguments had occurred to her
in bed last night, and after hastily looking up a few lines from her
common-place book, which always made her cry when she read them, but
which she hoped to be able to hurl at the lawyer with a steady voice,
she followed Miss Betty to the drawing-room.
It was half a relief and half a disappointment to find that the lawyer
was quite indifferent to the subject of their late contest. He
overflowed with compliments; was quite sure he must have had the worst
of the argument, and positively dying of curiosity to hear about the
baby.
The little ladies were very full of the subject themselves. An active
search for the baby's relations, conducted by the parson, the clerk,
the farm-bailiff, the constable, the cowherd, and several
supernumeraries, had so far proved quite vain. The country folk were
most anxious to assist, especially by word of mouth. Except a small but
sturdy number who had seen nothing, they had all seen "tramps," but
unluckily no two could be got together whose accounts of the tramps
themselves, of the hour at which they were seen, or of the direction in
which they went, would tally with each other.
The little ladies were quite alive to the possibility that the child's
parents might never be traced, indeed the matter had been constantly
before their minds ever since the parson had carried the baby to
Lingborough, and laid it in the arms of Thomasina, the servant.
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