I found her alone in the nursery, with her sleeping infant in her arms. Her eyes were bent pensively on its countenance, and there was an expression of serious thoughtfulness on her beautiful features, which became them as well as the gayety which was their native character.
"My dear, dear aunt," she said, as I kissed her cheek, "how much I owe you!"
"Owe me, my love! what do you mean?"
"If it had not been for you, Edward would have told me nothing. I should never have known half his causes of distress, and I should have believed him cold and indifferent, when, on the contrary, he was depressed by anxiety for me, and for our boy."
Here was a spring of action at once. The fountains of sympathy, of gratitude, of love, were opened; might not these waters prove sufficient to fertilize a life? I believed so, and I felt that Amy was saved.
I was not mistaken. From that day, she was a new creature. If the sacrifices she was called upon to make at first appeared great, they were soon rendered insignificant by the regret which she felt when she reflected how little her previous education had prepared her to make the best of a limited income, to prove the friend, companion, and confidante, which her husband would now need more than ever, or to fulfill the office of guide and instructress which her little boy would soon call upon her to perform.
"These are not subjects for regret, Amy," said I, when she poured out her heart to me, as she had been in the habit of doing in her childish days; "with youth and health, they are but stimulants to exertion."
Mr. Lennox went to India, but only for a year, and, sorely against her will, Amy was left behind. As she could not accompany him, she wished to return home with me, for a year's schooling, as she playfully expressed it, and, in spite of Mrs. R.'s remonstrances, I carried her off.
What a busy year we had of it! We cooked; we cut out linen (the village schoolmistress was for a time a cipher in that department); we tried experiments in domestic economy; we made calculations; then we read light books and heavy books, history and philosophy, poetry and romance, I being obliged to exercise great ingenuity to avoid an immoderate proportion of educational works, a department of literature to which Amy, in common with many young mothers, manifested a decided preference.
Thus occupied, the days and weeks glided swiftly away, but not without leaving traces of their passage. Amy's intellectual and moral growth in this twelvemonth was as rapid as was her boy's increase in physical proportions. She felt it herself, and, with her increased self-respect, increased her love and admiration of the husband, for whose sake she had been stimulated to self-government and self-tuition. Small had been the joy of her wedding-day, compared to the rapture with which, at the end of the year, she threw herself into his arms; and slight had been his disappointment after the honeymoon, to the delightful surprise which he felt every day on the discovery of some new improvement, or the promise of some fresh excellence in his lovely wife.