“Is it possible,” he said to himself, “that the fine woman I married--for she _was_ a fine woman, a deuced fine woman!--should have died to present the world with such a travesty! It's like nothing human! It's an affront to the family! Ah! the strain _will_ show! They say your sins will find you out! It was a sin to marry the woman! Damned fool I was! But she bewitched me! I _was_ bewitched!--Curse the little monster! I shan't breathe again till I'm out of the house! Where was the doctor? He ought to have seen to it! Hang it all, I'll go abroad!” Ugly as the child was, however, to many an eye the first thing evident in him would have been his strong likeness to his father--whose features were perfect, though at the moment, and at many a moment, their expression was other than attractive. Sir Wilton disliked children, and the dislike was mutual. Never did child run to him; never was child unwilling to leave him. Escaping from his grasp, he would turn and look back, like Christian emerging from the Valley of the Shadow, as if to weigh the peril he had been in. As tenderly as if he had been the loveliest of God's children, the woman bore her charge up staircases, and through corridors and passages, to the remote nursery, where, in a cradle whose gay furniture contrasted sadly with the countenance of the child and the fierceness of her own eyes, she gently laid him down. But long after he was asleep, she continued to bend over him, as if with difficulty restraining herself from clasping him again to her bosom.