“I see!” said the baronet with a laugh that had no merriment in it. “The creature is a monster! Well, if you think I am to blame, I can only protest that you are mistaken. I am not web-footed! The duckness must come from the other side.”

“I hope you will remember, sir Wilton!”

“Remember? What do you mean? Take the monster away.”

The woman rearranged the coverings of the little legs.

“Won’t you look at your lady before they put her in her coffin?” she said.

“What good would that do her? She’s past caring! No, I won’t! Why should I? Such sights are not pleasant.”

“The coffin’s a lonely chamber, sir Wilton. Lonely to lie all day and all night in.”

“She’s past feeling loneliness, I daresay!”

“You are heartless, sir Wilton!”

“Mind your own business. If I choose to be heartless, I have my reasons. Take the child away.”

Still she did not move. The baby, young as he was, had thrown the blanket from his face, and the father’s eyes were fixed upon it. While he gazed the nurse would not stir. He seemed fascinated by its ugliness.

“My God!” he said—for he had a habit of crying out as if he had a God—“The little brute hates me! Take it away, woman, before I strangle it!”

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 would be difficult to say.

“How could the woman have presented the world such a travesty? It’s like nothing human! It’s an affront to the family! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! What a fool I was! But she bewitched me. Curse the little monster! I won’t be able to breathe till I am out of the house. Where was the doctor? He ought to have seen it! Hang it all, I’ll go abroad!”

Ugly as the child was, to many an eye the first thing evident in him would have been his strong likeness to his father.

As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God’s children, the woman bore her charge up the staircase 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 gently laid him down. Long after he was asleep she continued to bend over him, hardly able to restrain herself from clasping him again in her arms.

There was a dramatic fitness even in the selection of this bold and outspoken nurse who was now the baby’s only protector. For she was the child’s aunt.

Jane Tuke had been married four or five years, but had no children. Lady Lestrange’s elder sister, she had gone gladly to be with her sister at the birth of her child. So great was lady Lestrange’s disappointment in her husband that she regarded the coming of his child almost with indifference. Jane, on the other hand, had an absolute passion for children. She had married a quarter for faith, a quarter for love, and a whole half for hope of being a mother. As displeasing as the infant was, to know him as her own son would have made the world a paradise to Jane. Her heart burned with divine indignation at the wrongs already heaped upon her nephew. The more the baby was rejected, the more hers he became! He belonged to her, for she was the only one who loved him. No vision of riches ever produced such a longing as this woman’s longing after the child of her sister.