And so, during the long summer months, the motherless child, in its deep mourning—­which looks so pathetic on a very young baby—­might be seen carried about in Elizabeth’s arms every where.  When, after the first six weeks, the wet nurse left—­in fact, two or three nurses successively were abolished—­she took little Henry solely under her own charge.  She had comparatively small experience, but she had common sense, and the strong motherly instinct which comes by nature to some women.  Besides, her whole soul was wrapped up in this little child.

From the hour when, even with her mistress dying before her eyes, Elizabeth had felt a strange thrill of comfort in the new duty which had come into her blank life, she took to this duty as women only can whose life has become a blank.  She received the child as a blessing sent direct from God; by unconscious hands—­for Mrs. Ascott knew nothing of what happened; something that would heal her wounded heart, and make her forget Tom.

And so it did.  Women and mothers well know how engrossing is the care of an infant; how each minute of the day is filled up with something to be done or thought of; so that “fretting” about extraneous things becomes quite impossible.  How gradually the fresh life growing up and expanding puts the worn out or blighted life into the back ground, and all the hopes and fancies cling around the small, beautiful present, the ever developing, the ever marvelous mystery of a young child’s existence!  Why it should be so, we can only guess; but that it is so, many a wretched wife, many a widowed mother, many a broken hearted, forlorn aunt, has thankfully proved.

Elizabeth proved it likewise.  She did not exactly lose all memory of her trouble, but it seemed lighter; it was swallowed up in this second passion of adopted motherhood.  And so she sank, quietly and at once, into the condition of a middle aged woman, whose life’s story—­and her sort of women have but one—­was a mere episode, told and ended.

For Esther had left and been married to Tom Cliffe within a few week’s of Mrs. Ascott’s funeral.  Of course, the household knew every thing; but nobody condoled with Elizabeth.  There was a certain stand-off-ishness about her which made them hold their tongues.  They treated her with much respect, as her new position demanded.  She took this, as she took every thing, with the grave quietness which was her fashion from her youth up; assumed her place as a confidential upper servant; dressed well but soberly, like a woman of forty, and was called “Mrs. Hand.”

The only trace her “disappointment” left upon her was a slightly bitter way of speaking about men in general, and a dislike to any chatter about love affairs and matrimony.  Her own story she was never known to refer to in the most distant way, except once.

Miss Hilary—­who, of course, had heard all, but delicately kept silence—­one night, when little Henry was not well, remained in the lodgings on Richmond Hill, and slept in the nursery, Elizabeth making up for herself a bed on the floor close beside baby and cradle.  In the dead of night, the two women, mistress and maid, by some chance, said a few things to one another which never might have been said in the daylight, and which, by tacit consent, were never afterward referred to by either, any more than if they had been spoken in a dream.