“Yes, mother; I cannot let her feel herself alone in the wide world any longer, and I must have the right to nurse her back to health. You will not withhold your consent, mother dear?”
“No,” she said, with a half-bewildered look as she accepted the support of his offered arm, “not if it is to make you and that poor young thing happy; but it is very sudden.”
CHAPTER IV.
A STRANGE REVELATION.
“The web of our life is of a mingled
Yarn, good and all together.”—Shakespeare.
For a few days the little Ethel was quite inconsolable, crying sadly for “Mamma;” but the new parents were very tender, patient, and affectionate, and the old love gradually faded from the baby memory, till at length it was utterly forgotten in the new. So also was the name her true mother had given her, Mrs. Kemper changing it to Florence, which she liked better.
Anxious that the child should believe herself their own by birth, the Kempers considered it fortunate that it was while journeying to a new home in the West, among strangers, in the little town of Cranley, that they obtained possession of her.
They breathed no hint of the little one’s history, and none of their new acquaintances had the least suspicion of the truth, as indeed how should they when to both parents “our little Floy” was evidently as the apple of the eye?