But it was not so with Harry, not even in his way of regarding his baby. He did not turn from it, in the beginning, with the blind repugnance and unreasoning, unrighteous grudge, with which some widowers are tempted to regard the child that has cost its mother her life. Certainly it was not her child, but her husband, who had killed Fan. Yet Harry might have been so far dishonest as to have given a sop to his conscience, by shifting a part of the responsibility and blame on the innocent child. He might have taken a cruel satisfaction in revenging Fan, by trampling alike on his own natural affections, and on the just claims of his infant daughter. But Harry never did so. He seemed rather to transfer at once to the baby all the fondness for the mother which was thrown back on his hands, when she was taken from him. In addition he was ready to lavish on the child a double portion of the protecting affection which, so long as he was himself, he had shown to Horace. Watching Harry in the new light of his mournful fatherhood, when he was called on, by every generous and manly impulse, to be father and mother in one, to the mite whose best friend or worst foe, whose nearest natural guardian, he found himself, Oliver Constable arrived at a correct conclusion. If any mere human creature could help to make a man of Harry Stanhope, could raise him from his soulless levity and the vicious craving which was grafted on it, it was—strange yet natural to say, not a brave, devoted woman like Fan, who had gone down into the breach and held a shield over her husband, and striven vainly to be the stay to him which, had their relations to each other been what they ought, he should have proved to her—but this merest atom of a fellow-mortal, a thousand times weaker than Harry himself, who could neither appeal to him nor remonstrate with him, who could simply hang heavily upon him in her helplessness, and who was, humanly speaking, altogether at his mercy for happiness or wretchedness. Oliver was inclined to believe that Harry’s self-conviction had gone to the root of the matter, and that even his most mercurial temperament would never shake it off altogether.