become interested in the child itself. What female fails to feel such
interest in the helpless creature she has tended? And to sum the whole
up, the dame had a share of human vanity; and being a sort of Lady
Bountiful in her way (for the character was not then confined to the
old and the foolish), she was proud of the skill by which she had
averted the probable attacks of hereditary malady, so inveterate in
the family of Bridgenorth. It needed not, perhaps, in other cases,
that so many reasons should be assigned for an act of neighbourly
humanity; but civil war had so lately torn the country asunder, and
broken all the usual ties of vicinage and good neighbourhood, that it
was unusual to see them preserved among persons of different political
opinions.

Major Bridgenorth himself felt this; and while the tear of joy in his
eye showed how gladly he would accept Lady Peveril's proposal, he
could not help stating the obvious inconveniences attendant upon her
scheme, though it was in the tone of one who would gladly hear them
overruled. "Madam," he said, "your kindness makes me the happiest and
most thankful of men; but can it be consistent with your own
convenience? Sir Geoffrey has his opinions on many points, which have
differed, and probably do still differ, from mine. He is high-born,
and I of middling parentage only. He uses the Church Service, and I
the Catechism of the Assembly of Divines at Westminster----"

"I hope you will find prescribed in neither of them," said the Lady
Peveril, "that I may not be a mother to your motherless child. I
trust, Master Bridgenorth, the joyful Restoration of his Majesty, a
work wrought by the direct hand of Providence, may be the means of
closing and healing all civil and religious dissensions among us, and
that, instead of showing the superior purity of our faith, by