such a longing as this woman longed with after the child of her dead
sister.

The body that bore was laid in the earth, the thing born was left upon
it. The mother had but come, exposed her infant on the rough shore of
time, and forsaken him in his nakedness. There he lay, not knowing whence
he came, or whither he was going, urged to live by a hunger and thirst he
had not invented, and did not understand. His mother had helplessly
forsaken him, but the God in another woman had taken him up: there was a
soul to love him, two arms to carry him, and a strong heart to shelter
him.

Sir Wilton returned to London, and there enjoyed himself--not much, but a
little the more that no woman sat at Mortgrange with a right to complain
that he took his pleasure without her. He lived the life of the human
animals frequenting the society of their kind from a gregarious instinct,
and for common yet opposing self-ends. He had begun to assume the
staidness, if not dullness, of the animal whose first youth has departed,
but he was only less frolicsome, not more human. He was settling down to
what he had made himself; no virtue could claim a share in the diminished
rampancy of his vices. What a society is that which will regard as
reformed the man whom assuaging fires have left an exhausted slag--a
thing for which as yet no use is known, who suggests no promise of change
or growth, gives no poorest hint of hope concerning his fate!

With the first unrecognized sense of approaching age, a certain habit of
his race began to affect him, and the idea of a quieter life, with a
woman whose possession would make him envied, grew mildly attractive. A
brilliant marriage in another county would, besides, avenge him on the
narrow-minded of his own, who had despised his first choice! With