For seven days, as they tell me, my babe lay by my side--its tiny hands touched mine--it slept at my breast. But I remember nothing--nothing! I was quite mad all the while. And then--it died--and I have no little face to dream of--no memory of the sweetness that has been. it is all to me as if I had never seen my child. If I had only had my senses for one day--one hour: if I could but have seen Laurence when they gave him his baby boy. Bitterly he grieves, his mother says, because he has no heir. * * * My first waking fear was horrible. Had I betrayed any thing during my delirium? I think not. Louisa says I lay all the time silent, dull, and did not even notice my husband, though he bent over me like one distracted. Poor Laurence! I see him but little now: they will not suffer me. It is perhaps well: I could not bear his grief and my own too: I might not be able to keep my secret safe. * * * * * I went yesterday to look at the tiny mound--all that is left to me of my dream of motherhood. Such a happy dream as it was, too! How it comforted me, many a time: how I used to sit and think of my darling that was to come: to picture it lying in my arms--playing at my feet--growing in beauty--a boy, a youth, a man! And this--this is all--this little grave. Perhaps I may never have another child. If so, all the deep love which nature teaches, and which nature has even now awakened in my heart, must find no object, and droop and wither away, or be changed into repining. No! please God, _that_ last shall never be: I will not embitter the blessings I have, by mourning over those denied. But I must love something, in the way that I would have loved my child. I have lost my babe; some babe may have lost a mother. A thought comes--I shudder--I tremble--yet I follow it. I will pause a little, and then-- * * * * * In Mr. Shelmerdine's absence, I have accomplished my plan. I have contrived to visit the place where lives that hapless child--my husband's child. I do believe my love to Laurence must be such as never before was borne to man by woman. It draws me even toward this little one: forgetting all wife-like pride, I seem to yearn over the boy. But is this strange? In my first girlish dreams, many a time I have taken a book he had touched--a flower he had gathered--hid it from my sisters, kissed it, and wept over it for days. It was folly; but it only showed how precious I held every thing belonging to him. And should I not hold precious what is half himself--his own son? I will go and see the child to-morrow. Weeks have passed, and yet I have had no strength to tell what that to-morrow brought. Strange book of human fate! each leaf closed until the appointed time--if we could but turn it, and read. Yet it is best not.