gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she continued to bend
over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself from clasping him
again to her bosom.

Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children, and
the lack seemed to have intensified her maternity. Elder sister to lady
Lestrange, she had gone gladly to receive her child in her arms, and had
watched and waited for it with an expectation far stronger than that of
the mother; for so thorough was lady Lestrange's disappointment in her
husband, that she regarded the advent of his child almost with
indifference. Jane had an absolute passion for children. She had married
a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope. This
divinely inexplicable child-passion is as unintelligible to those devoid
of it, as its absence is marvellous to those possessed by it. Its
presence is its justification, its being its sole explanation, itself
its highest reason. Surely on those who cherish it, the shadow of the
love-creative God must rest more than on some other women! Unpleasing as
was the infant, to know him her own would have made the world a paradise
to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already
heaped upon him. Hardly born, he was persecuted! Ugly! he was _not_ ugly!
Was he not come straight from the fountain of life, from the Father of
children? That such a father as she had left in the library should
repudiate him was well! She loved to think of his rejection. She brooded
with delight, in the midst of her wrath, on every word of disgust that
had fallen from his unfatherly lips. The more her baby was rejected, the
more he was hers! He belonged to her, and her only, for she only loved
him! She could say with _France_ in _King Lear_, "Be it lawful I take up
what's cast away!" To her the despised one was the essence of all riches.
The joy of a miser is less than the joy of a mother, as gold is less than
a live soul, as greed is less than love. No vision of jewels ever gave