“If I were you,” said Letitia to the nurse, “I would not have the child covered up so. The air will do him nothing but good. Throw off all your shawls, and let him breathe the good air. I am sure his mother would say so if she were here.” Letitia, at least in that action, meant no harm to the child. She said it as she would have done to any ignorant cottager who half smothered her baby to keep it from cold. But while she held the infant in her arms, and put down her cheek upon its little dark, downy head, an impulse that was horrible came over her. Oh, the little interloper!--the child so undesired, so unnecessary--who had taken her children’s inheritance from them! To think that a little pressure more than usual, a little more close folding of the shawls, and it would stand in Duke’s way no more. The thought made her strain towards her with a sudden throb of almost savage excitement the little helpless atom, who could never tell any tale. CHAPTER XXIII. Mary was lying as usual in bed, much shrunken from the Mary we knew, her mild countenance clouded with that haze of trouble which seems to come with any disturbance of the mind. There was no reason that she should lie in bed except that prostration of will and feeling which came from a disordered brain. It troubled her to move at all, to raise her head, to use her hand, except in moments of spasmodic energy, when she would spring up in bed, and a stream of wild and terrified life would seem to flow in her veins. Terror was always a chief part of her energy, a desire to fly, to hide herself, to avoid some terrible, ever-menacing danger. On this morning she had been very quiet. For about an hour her sister had been seated by the bedside holding her hand, talking to her about common things; and Mary, when she had replied at all, had replied, Agnes thought, with so much sense and calmness that her heart was quite light. “She is a great deal better, nurse. Don’t you think she is a great deal better this morning?” Miss Hill had said. The nurse shook her head, standing on the other side of the bed, but made with her lips a reassuring reply. And peace was in the room where perhaps, the anxious watchers thought, excitement and danger were passing over, and all might be beginning to be well.