What Lily had intended to do when she had found out Marg’ret and recovered her child--as she was so confident of doing--I cannot tell. She did not herself know. This was the first step to be taken: every thing else came a world behind. Whether she was to carry the baby back in her arms, to beard Sir Robert with it and make her explanation--though with the conviction that she would then be turned from the door of her only home forever--or whether she intended, having escaped, to do what always seems so easy and natural to a girl’s imagination: to fly away somewhere and hide herself with her child, and be fed by the ravens, like the prophet--she herself did not know and I cannot tell. The only thing certain was that she thought of the little house among the Edinburgh roofs--that house which could only be got at the term, and which it now made her heart sick to think of--no more. Had she found the door open for her and every thing ready Lily would have turned her back on that open door. She could not endure the thought of it; she could not even think of the time when it would have been paradise to her, the realization of her dearest hopes. In the depths of her injured soul she would have desired to find her child without even making her presence known to her husband. She had no desire even to see him again--he seemed to have alienated her too completely for any repentance. And up to this moment, her mind being altogether occupied by her child, none of those relentings toward those whom we have loved and who have wronged us, which make the heart bleed, had come upon Lily. She thought of nothing but her child, her child! to have him again in her arms, to possess him again, the one thing in the world that was entirely her own, altogether her own. The fact that this was not so, that the child was not and never could be entirely her own, did not disturb Lily’s mind. Had she been reminded of it she would not have believed. She thought, as every young mother thinks in the wonderful closeness of that new relation and the sense of all it has cost her, that to this at least there could be no contradiction and no doubt--that her baby was hers, hers! and that no one in the world had the right to him that she had. It was for him that she hurried, as much as any one could hurry in these days, to Edinburgh, grudging every moment of delay--the time of changing the horses, which she felt inclined to get out and do herself, so slow, so slow was every-body concerned; the time for refreshments, as if one wanted to eat and drink when one was hastening to recover one’s child. But however slow a journey is the end of it comes at last. It was a comfort to Lily that she knew where to go to--to the house of a very decent woman, known to Beenie, who kept lodgings, and where she could be quite quiet, out of the way of her former friends. But they arrived only in the evening, and there was another long night to be gone through before any thing could be done. CHAPTER XL