But I must love something, in the way that I would have loved my child. I have lost my babe; some babe may have lost a mother. A thought comes—I shudder—I tremble—yet I follow it. I will pause a little, and then—
In Mr. Shelmerdine's absence, I have accomplished my plan. I have contrived to visit the place where lives that hapless child—my husband's child.
I do believe my love to Laurence must be such as never before was borne to man by woman. It draws me even toward this little one: forgetting all wife-like pride, I seem to yearn over the boy. But is this strange? In my first girlish dreams, many a time I have taken a book he had touched—a flower he had gathered—hid it from my sisters, kissed it, and wept over it for days. It was folly; but it only showed how precious I held every thing belonging to him. And should I not hold precious what is half himself—his own son?
I will go and see the child to-morrow.
Weeks have passed, and yet I have had no strength to tell what that to-morrow brought. Strange book of human fate! each leaf closed until the appointed time—if we could but turn it, and read. Yet it is best not.
I went to the cottage—alone, of course. I asked the old woman to let me come in and rest, for I was a stranger, weak and tired. She did so kindly, remembering, perhaps, how I had once noticed the boy. He was her grandson she told me—her daughter's child.
Her daughter! And this old creature was a coarse, rough-spoken woman—a laborer's wife. Laurence Shelmerdine—the elegant—the refined—what madness must have possessed him!
"She died very young, then, your daughter?" I found courage to say.