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‘Henry!’ she cried, resisting the appealing touch, ‘have you no heart for your own child?’

He leant upon her for a moment, drawing as it seemed her whole little person, and all her energy and strength, into himself. ‘I’m all upset, Elizabeth. I don’t know what I have, whether heart or anything else—except you, my dear, except you. Everything will go right as long as I have you.’

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In the perplexity of this extraordinary crisis they both went, without another word, ‘home’: though it was no more home than these wonderful new circumstances were the course of everyday. If we were to prophesy the conduct of human creatures in moments of great emotion by what would seem probable, or even natural, how far from the fact we should be! Colonel Hayward, a man of the tenderest heart and warmest affections, suddenly discovers that he has a child—a child by whose appearance, and everything about her, he has been pleased and attracted, the child of his first love, his young wife to whose cruel death he has contributed, though unwittingly, unintentionally, meaning no evil. Would not all ordinary means of conveyance be too slow, all obstacles as nothing in his way, the very movement of the world arrested till he had taken this abandoned child into his arms, and assured her of his penitence, his joy, his love! But nothing could be further from his actual action. He went back to Bellendean with a feeling that he would perhaps know better what to do were he within the four walls of a room where he could shut himself and be alone. It would be easier to think there than in the park, where everything was in perpetual motion, leaves rustling, branches waving, birds singing,—the whole world astir. ‘If we were only in our own room,’ he said to his wife, ‘we could think—what it was best to do.’