Sylvia's Lovers — Volume 3 by Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
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page 15 of 224 (06%)
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to her. All the old ways of holding a baby, of hushing it to sleep,
of tenderly guarding its little limbs from injury, came back, like the habits of her youth, to Bell; and she was never so happy or so easy in her mind, or so sensible and connected in her ideas, as when she had Sylvia's baby in her arms. It was a pretty sight to see, however familiar to all of us such things may be--the pale, worn old woman, in her quaint, old-fashioned country dress, holding the little infant on her knees, looking at its open, unspeculative eyes, and talking the little language to it as though it could understand; the father on his knees, kept prisoner by a small, small finger curled round his strong and sinewy one, and gazing at the tiny creature with wondering idolatry; the young mother, fair, pale, and smiling, propped up on pillows in order that she, too, might see the wonderful babe; it was astonishing how the doctor could come and go without being drawn into the admiring vortex, and look at this baby just as if babies came into the world every day. 'Philip,' said Sylvia, one night, as he sate as still as a mouse in her room, imagining her to be asleep. He was by her bed-side in a moment. 'I've been thinking what she's to be called. Isabella, after mother; and what were yo'r mother's name?' 'Margaret,' said he. 'Margaret Isabella; Isabella Margaret. Mother's called Bell. She might be called Bella.' |
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