Is there ever a time when a mother ceases to regard the creature she has brought into the world as other than a child? He may be a bearded man, the father of a family, or the hero of a nation—or she may be a weary and harassed woman, full of care and anxieties; but to their mothers they are always children, to be looked after, loved and cared for. There is no position in which maternal love shines more brightly than when the infant she has nourished at her breast is returned upon her hands, a man or woman, perhaps in middle age, but weak, ill, helpless, and requiring a mother’s care. She may mourn over the necessity, but how she revels in having her baby back again, as dependent on her as when he or she had not yet begun to walk! Who would nurse him and watch him, and know neither fatigue or privation for his sake as she can do? Happy those who have a mother to fly to when they are ill or miserable!
Mrs Llewellyn smoothed out Nell’s luxuriant braids of hair, revelling in their beauty, and put her own best night-dress on her, and laid her between the snow-white sheets as if she had been four years old, instead of four-and-twenty. But this latter necessity brought an awkward question in its train. Where had Nell left her own things? Had she brought them with her and deposited them at the railway station, or were they to follow her from London?
At first the girl was silent. She did not know what to say. The awkwardness of the situation had not struck her before. Her face blanched still paler, and her mother saw she had introduced an embarrassing subject. Nell had turned round on her pillow and hidden her face from view.
‘Never mind thinking about it to-night, my dear,’ said Mrs Llewellyn kindly; ‘you’re too tired. Try and go to sleep, Nell, and you can tell me everything to-morrow.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Nell, with her face still hidden, ‘you shall hear all about it to-morrow. I have no box with me, mother. I—I got into a little scrape—debt, you know—and I had to part with my clothes. You won’t be angry with me?’
‘Angry with you, my dear? Don’t get any foolish notions like that into your head. If you sold your things to pay your debt, it was an honest thing to do, and we’d be the last, father and I, to blame you for it. And we’ve got enough money in the stocking to buy you more. So set your mind at rest about that, my girl, and now go to sleep and wake bright to-morrow.’
She kissed her daughter as she spoke, and went back to the parlour to rejoin her husband. But the first words the farmer uttered fanned the little breath of suspicion which she had entertained about Nell’s sudden coming home into a flame.
‘Well, how is she?’ demanded Llewellyn, as his wife entered the parlour.
‘Oh, well enough, Griffith,’ she replied; ‘very tired, as you may have seen, and a bit inclined to be hysterical, but that’ll all wear off by to-morrow.’
‘I hope it may,’ said the farmer; ‘but I don’t quite understand why she came home without giving us the least warning. It seems queer now, don’t it? Here was the girl in a first-class place, drawing big wages, as Hetty said she must from the lavish way in which she spent money whilst they were in town, and without word or warning she chucks it all up and rushes home to us.’