THE HIGH-BORN BABE
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T really was not such a bad baby—for a baby. Its face was round and quite clean, which babies' faces are not always, as I dare say you know by your own youthful relatives; and Dora said its cape was trimmed with real lace, whatever that may be—I don't see myself how one kind of lace can be realler than another. It was in a very swagger sort of perambulator when we saw it; and the perambulator was standing quite by itself in the lane that leads to the mill.
"I wonder whose baby it is," Dora said. "Isn't it a darling, Alice?"
Alice agreed to its being one, and said she thought it was most likely the child of noble parents stolen by gipsies.
"These two, as likely as not," Noël said. "Can't you see something crime-like in the very way they're lying?"
They were two tramps, and they were lying on the grass at the edge of the lane on the shady side, fast asleep, only a very little further on than where the Baby was. They were very ragged, and their snores did have a sinister sound.
"I expect they stole the titled heir at dead of
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