in? Is the hawk to forego his natural prey for any
such paltry consideration as a vulgar old woman or a brood of squalling
brats?

Captain Paget was not guilty of any persistent unkindness towards the
woman whose fate he had deigned to link with his own. The consciousness
that he had conferred a supreme honour oh Mary Anne Kepp by offering
her his hand, and a share of his difficulties, never deserted him. He
made no attempt to elevate the ignorant girl into companionship with
himself. He shuddered when she misplaced her h's and turned from her
peevishly, with a muttered oath, when she was more than usually
ungrammatical: but though he found it disagreeable to hear her, he
would have found it troublesome to set her right; and trouble was a
thing which Horatio Paget held in gentlemanly aversion. The idea that
the mode of his existence could be repulsive to his wife--that this
low-born and low-bred girl could have scruples that he never felt, and
might suffer agonies of remorse and shame of which his coarser nature
was incapable--never entered the Captain's mind. It would have been too
great an absurdity for the daughter of plebeian Kepps to affect a
tenderness of conscience unknown to the scion of Pagets and Cromies and
Nugents. Mary Anne was afraid of her elegant husband; and she
worshipped and waited upon him in meek silence, keeping the secret of
her own sorrows, and keeping it so well that he never guessed the
manifold sources of that pallor of countenance and hollow brightness of
eye which had of late annoyed him when he looked at his wife. She had
borne him a child--a sweet girl baby, with those great black eyes that
always have rather a weird look in the face of infancy; and she would
fain have clung to the infant as the hope and consolation of her
joyless life. But the vulture is not a domestic bird, and a baby would
have been an impediment in the rapid hegiras which Captain Paget and
his wife were wont to make. The Captain put an advertisement in a daily
paper before the child was a week old; and in less than a fortnight
after Mary Anne had looked at the baby face for the first time, she was
called upon to surrender her treasure to an elderly woman of fat and
greasy aspect, who had agreed to bring the infant up "by hand" in a
miserable little street in a remote and dreary district lying between
Vauxhall and Battersea.

Mary Anne gave up the child uncomplainingly, as meekly as she would
have surrendered herself