so striking in effect, as the banished lilies and roses. Her hair had
grown darker and deeper, in the shadow that lingered in its masses;
her eyes, even if you could have guessed that they had shed bitter
tears in their day, had a thoughtful, spiritual look about them,
that made you wonder at their depth, and look--and look again. The
increase of dignity in her face had been imparted to her form. I do
not know if she had grown taller since the birth of her child, but
she looked as if she had. And although she had lived in a very humble
home, yet there was something about either it or her, or the people
amongst whom she had been thrown during the last few years, which had
so changed her, that whereas, six or seven years ago, you would have
perceived that she was not altogether a lady by birth and education,
yet now she might have been placed among the highest in the land, and
would have been taken by the most critical judge for their equal,
although ignorant of their conventional etiquette--an ignorance
which she would have acknowledged in a simple child-like way, being
unconscious of any false shame.

Her whole heart was in her boy. She often feared that she loved him
too much--more than God Himself--yet she could not bear to pray to
have her love for her child lessened. But she would kneel down by his
little bed at night--at the deep, still midnight--with the stars that
kept watch over Rizpah shining down upon her, and tell God what I
have now told you, that she feared she loved her child too much,
yet could not, would not, love him less; and speak to Him of her
one treasure as she could speak to no earthly friend. And so,
unconsciously, her love for her child led her up to love to God, to
the All-knowing, who read her heart.

It might be superstition--I dare say it was--but, somehow, she never
lay down to rest without saying, as she looked her last on her boy,
"Thy will, not mine, be done;" and even while she trembled and shrank
with infinite dread from sounding the depths of what that will might
be, she felt as if her treasure were more secure to waken up rosy and
bright in the morning, as one over whose slumbers God's holy angels
had watched, for the very words which she had turned away in sick
terror from realising the night before.

Her daily absence at her duties to the Bradshaw children only
ministered to her love for Leonard. Everything does minister to love
when its foundation lies deep in a true heart, a