To say the truth, Lillie was too sick and suffering for sentiment.  It requires a certain amount of bodily strength and soundness to feel emotions of love; and, for a long time, the little Lillie had to be banished from the mother’s apartment, as she lay weary in her darkened room, with only a consciousness of a varied succession of disagreeables and discomforts.  Her general impression about herself was, that she was a much abused and most unfortunate woman; and that all that could ever be done by the utmost devotion of everybody in the house was insufficient to make up for such trials as had come upon her.

A nursing mother was found for the little Lillie in the person of a goodly Irish woman, fair, fat, and loving; and the real mother had none of those awakening influences, from the resting of the little head in her bosom, and the pressure of the little helpless fingers, which magnetize into existence the blessed power of love.

She had wasted in years of fashionable folly, and in a life led only for excitement and self-gratification, all the womanly power, all the capability of motherly giving and motherly loving that are the glory of womanhood.  Kathleen, the white-armed, the gentle-bosomed, had all the simple pleasures, the tendernesses, the poetry of motherhood; while poor, faded, fretful Lillie had all the prose—­the sad, hard, weary prose—­of sickness and pain, unglorified by love.

John did not well know what to do with himself in Lillie’s darkened room; where it seemed to him he was always in the way, always doing something wrong; where his feet always seemed too large and heavy, and his voice too loud; and where he was sure, in his anxious desire to be still and gentle, to upset something, or bring about some general catastrophe, and to go out feeling more like a criminal than ever.

The mother and the nurse, stationed there like a pair of chief mourners, spoke in tones which experienced feminine experts seem to keep for occasions like these, and which, as Hawthorne has said, give an effect as if the voice had been dyed black.  It was a comfort and relief to pass from the funeral gloom to the little pink-ruffled chamber among the cherry-trees, where the birds were singing and the summer breezes blowing, and the pretty Kathleen was crooning her Irish songs, and invoking the holy virgin and all the saints to bless the “darlin’” baby.

“An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em to a house, sir; the angels comes down wid ’em.  We can’t see ’em, sir; but, bless the darlin’, she can.  And she smiles in her sleep when she sees ’em.”

[Illustration:  “An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em, sir.”]

Rose and Grace came often to this bower with kisses and gifts and offerings, like a pair of nice fairy godmothers.  They hung over the pretty little waxen miracle as she opened her great blue eyes with a silent, mysterious wonder; but, alas! all these delicious moments, this artless love of the new baby life, was not for the mother.  She was not strong enough to enjoy it.  Its cries made her nervous; and so she kept the uncheered solitude of her room without the blessing of the little angel.