ment when she
should call him. This she duly did about three o'clock that day, leading
him in by a garden door, and upstairs to the nursery where the child lay.
He was in his little cot, breathing calmly, his arm thrown over his head,
and his silken curls crushed into the pillow. His father, now almost to
be pitied, bent over him, and a tear from his eye wetted the coverlet.

She held up a warning finger as he lowered his mouth to the lips of the
boy.

'But oh, why not?' implored he.

'Very well, then,' said she, relenting. 'But as gently as possible.'

He kissed the child without waking him, turned, gave him a last look, and
followed her out of the chamber, when she conducted him off the premises
by the way he had come.

But this remedy for his sadness of heart at being a stranger to his own
son, had the effect of intensifying the malady; for while originally, not
knowing or having ever seen the boy, he had loved him vaguely and
imaginatively only, he now became attached to him in flesh and bone, as
any parent might; and the feeling that he could at best only see his
child at the rarest and most cursory moments, if at all, drove him into a
state of distraction which threatened to overthrow his promise to the
boy's mother to keep out of his sight.

But such was his chivalrous respect for Lady Icenway, and his regret at
having ever deceived her, that he schooled his poor heart into
submission. Owing to his loneliness, all the fervour of which he was
capable--and that was much--flowed now in the channel of parental and
marital love--for a child who did not know him, and a woman who had
ceased to love him.

At length this singular punishment became such a torture to the poor
foreigner that he resolved to lessen it at all hazards, compatible with
punctilious care for the name of the lady his former wife, to whom his
attachment seemed to increase in proportion to her punitive treatment of
him. At one time of his life he had taken great interest in
tulip-culture, as well as gardening in general; and since the ruin of his
fortunes, and his arrival in England, he had made of his knowledge a
precarious income in the hot-houses of nurserymen and others. With the
new idea in his head he applied himself zealously to the business, till
he acquired in a few months great skill in horticulture. Waiting till
the noble lord, his lady's husband, had room for an under-gardener of a
general sort, he offered himself for the pl