Sometimes he wondered a little himself at this quiescence—­at the slight impression he seemed to make on his son, whom he had fully intended to rouse to remonstrance about it—­at the tender way in which the young wife ministered to her sister, and at the great change for the worse that he soon began to observe in Emily’s appearance.

Nobody liked to tell him the cause, and he would not see it; even when it became an acknowledged fact, which every one else talked of, that the little one was ill, he resolutely refused to see it; said the weather was against a child born in India—­blamed the east wind.  Even when the family doctor tried to let him know that the child was not likely to be long for this world, he was angry, with all the unreasonable volubility of a man who thinks others are deceiving him, rather than grieved for the peril of the little life and the anguish of the mother’s heart.

Now came indeed “the rest of it.”  What a rending away of heart and life it seemed to let go the object of this absorbing, satisfying love!  Now she was to lose, where the love had been bestowed; and she felt as if death itself was in the bitter cup.

It was not till the child was actually passing away, after little more than a fortnight’s illness, that his grandfather could be brought to believe in his danger.  He had been heaping promises of what he would do for him on the mother, as if to raise her courage.  With kindly wrong-headed obstinacy he had collected and detailed to her accounts of how ill other children had been and had recovered, had been getting fresh medical opinions, and proposing to try new remedies; but no sooner was all over, and the afflicted mother was led from her dead child by his son, than he tormented himself and the doctors by demanding why he had been kept in the dark so long, why he had not been allowed to try change of air, why, if the symptoms showed mortal disease from the first, he had been allowed to set his heart on the child as he had done.  No one now had anything to say to Emily.  She had only been a widow a month, and the first loss had had no bitterness in it, though she had sorrowed with the tender affection of a loyal heart.  The death of her child was almost the loss of all.

Valentine in the meantime had taken his sister Liz to a little quiet place; there, as her marriage could not be put off, and the ship was decided on in which they were to sail for New Zealand, he acted the part of father, and gave her away at the quietest wedding possible, seeing her off afterwards, and returning to take up his abode in his uncle’s house, about three weeks after the death of Emily’s little child.  Not one of the late inhabitants had been left in his old home excepting Mrs. Henfrey, who remained to receive the bride, and was still there, though the newly-married pair had been home a week.  Valentine had found ample time to consider how he should behave to Dorothea, Mrs. Brandon.  He had also become