With a glance whose mingled anger and scorn the father did not see, the
nurse turned and went.

He kept staring after her till the door shut, then fell back into his
chair, exclaiming once more, "My God!"--What or whom he meant by the
word, it were hard to say.

"Is it possible," he said to himself, "that the fine woman I married--for
she _was_ a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have died to present
the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront
to the family! Ah! the strain _will_ show! They say your sins will find
you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she
bewitched me! I _was_ bewitched!--Curse the little monster! I shan't
breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought
to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!"

Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident in
him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose features
were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their
expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children, and
the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child
unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look
back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to
weigh the peril he had been in.

As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman
bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to the
remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted sadly
with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her own eyes, she