It did not. I only told myself that she was clearly fond of children and would be a kind nurse to my baby. It even pleased me, in my foolish motherly selfishness, that she was a plain-featured person, whom baby could never come to love as she would, I was sure, love me.
I felt better after I had taken tea, and as it was then seven o'clock, and the sun was setting horizontally through the cypresses of the cemetery, I knew it was time to go.
I could not do that, though, without undressing baby and singing her to sleep. And even then I sat for a while with an aching heart, and Isabel on my knee, thinking of how I should have to go to bed that night, for the first time, without her.
Mrs. Oliver, in the meantime, examining the surplus linen which I had brought in my parcel, was bursting into whispered cries of delight over it, and, being told I had made the clothes myself, was saying:
"What a wonderful seamstress you might be if you liked, ma'am."
At length the time came to leave baby, and no woman knows the pain of that experience who has not gone through it.
Though I really believed my darling would be loved and cared for, and knew she would never miss me, or yet know that I was gone (there was a pang even in that thought, and in every other kind of comforting), I could not help it, that, as I was putting my cherub into her cot, my tears rained down on her little face and awakened her, so that I had to kneel by her side and rock her to sleep again.
"You'll be good to my child, won't you, Mrs. Oliver?" I said.
"'Deed I will, ma'am," the woman replied.
"You'll bath her every day, will you not?"