The nurse appeared at this moment, carrying the heir of the Grangers, gloriously arrayed in blue velvet, and looking fully conscious of his magnificence.
"But I do like to have a drive with my pet-lamb, don't I, darling?" said the mother, stooping to kiss the plump rosy cheek. And then there followed some low confidential talk, in the fond baby language peculiar to young mothers.
"I should have thought you would have been glad to get a morning alone, for once in a way," remarked Sophia, coming over to the baby, and giving him a stately kiss. She liked him tolerably well in her own way, and was not angry with him for having come into the world to oust her from her proud position as sole heiress to her father's wealth. The position had been very pleasant to her, and she had not seen it slip away from her without many a pang; but, however she might dislike Clarissa, she was not base enough to hate her father's child. If she could have had the sole care and management of him, physicked and dieted him after her own method, and developed the budding powers of his infant mind by her favourite forcing system—made a model villager of him, in short—she might have grown even to love him. But these privileges being forbidden to her—her wisdom being set at naught, and her counsel rejected—she could not help regarding Lovel Granger as more or less an injury.
"I should have thought you would have been glad of a morning at home,
Clarissa," she repeated.
"Not such a fine morning as this, Sophy. It would be such a pity for baby to lose the sunshine; and I have really nothing to do."
"If I had known a little sooner that you were going, I would have gone with you," said Miss Granger.
Clarissa's countenance fell. She could not help that little troubled look, which told Miss Granger that her society would not have been welcome.
"You would have had no objection to my coming with you, I suppose?" the fair Sophia said sharply. "Baby is not quite a monopoly."
"Of course not. If you'll put on your things now, Sophia, I'll wait for you."
It was a hard thing for Clarissa to make the offer, when she had been waiting so anxiously for this opportunity of seeing her brother. To be in the same city with him, and not see him, was more painful than to be divided from him by half the earth, as she had been. It was harder still to have to plot and plan and stoop to falsehood in order to compass a meeting. But she remembered the stern cold look in her husband's face when she had spoken of Austin, and she could not bring herself to degrade her brother by entreating Daniel Granger's indulgence for his past misdeeds, or Daniel Granger's interest in his future fortunes.