It would be hard to find a stronger contrast than between those two women. Jane’s countenance was almost coarse, but its rugged outline was grand. Her hair grew low down on her forehead, and she had deep-set eyes. Her complexion was rough, her nose large and thick. Her mouth was large also, the curve of her lip sweet, occasionally humorous. Her chin was strong, and the composite of her face might be called masculine. But when she silently regarded her child, it grew beautiful with the radiant tenderness of protection.

Her visitors left the door open behind them. Jane rose and shut it, sat down again, and gazed at the infant. Perhaps he vaguely understood the sorrow and dread on her face, for he started to cry. Jane clasped him to her bosom. She felt certain she would not long be permitted to stay and care for him! In the lady’s silence, her jealous love saw the doom of her darling. What precise doom she dared not ask herself. The thought that she should be his guardian no more was unthinkable, an idea for which there should be no place in her soul! Unfathomable as is the love between man and woman is also the love of woman to child.

She spent a restless night, certain that the decree of banishment was soon to go out against her. She must go, yet her heart cried out that he was her own. In her very lap his mother had lain before him, carried by day, and at night folded in the same arms—Jane herself but six years old. Never had there been a difference between the two sisters until Robina began to listen to sir Wilton, whom Jane could not endure.

When she responded to her sister’s cry for help, she made her promise that no one should know who she was, she should simply be taken for and treated as a hired nurse. Why Jane stipulated this, it was hard to say, but so careful were they both that no one at Mortgrange suspected the nurse as having the same blood as the ugly heir left in her charge. No one dreamed that the child’s aunt had forsaken her own husband to nurse him. She, in turn, had promised her sister never to leave him, and this pledge only strengthened the bond of her passion.

The only question was how to be faithful to her pledge and what to do when she was relieved of her duties. Seeing those thin, close-pressed lips in her mind’s eye, Jane knew she could not count on remaining where she was beyond a few more days.

Jane Tuke was not only a woman capable of making up her mind, but a woman of resource, with the advantage of foresight. Often she had thought about the very possibility she was now facing. That same night, after her darling was asleep, she sat at work with needle and scissors far into the morning, making alterations on an old print dress. For several nights thereafter she was similarly occupied, though not a scrap or sign of the labour was visible in the morning.