The father and bridegroom looked on, silent as they.  What could he say or do?  It was the natural and necessary opening up of that vexed question—­second marriages, concerning which moralists, sentimentalists, and practical people argue forever, and never come to any conclusion.  Of course not, because each separate case should decide itself.  The only universal rule or law, if there be one, is that which applies equally to the love before marriage; that as to a complete, mutual first love, any after love is neither likely, necessary, nor desirable; so, to anyone who has known a perfect first marriage—­the whole satisfaction of every requirement of heart and soul and human affection—­unto such, a second marriage, like a second love, would be neither right nor wrong, advisable nor unadvisable, but simply impossible.

What could he do—­the father who had just given his children a new mother, they being old enough not only to understand this, but previously taught; as most people are so fatally ready to teach children, the usual doctrine about step-mothers, and also quite ready to rebel against the same?

The step-mother likewise, what could she do, even had she recognized and felt all that the children’s behavior implied?

Alas! (I say “alas!” for this was as sad a thing as the other) she did not recognize it.  She scarcely noticed it at all.  In her countenance was no annoyance—­no sharp pain, that even in that first bridal hour she was not first and sole, as every woman may righteously wish to be.  There came to her no sting of regret, scarcely unnatural, to watch another woman’s children already taking the first and best of that fatherly love which it would be such exquisite joy to see lavished upon her own.  Alas! poor Christian! all these things passed over her as the wind passes over a bare February tree, stirring no emotions, for there were none to stir.  Her predominating feeling was a vague sense of relief in the presence of the children, and of delight in the exceeding beauty of the youngest.

“This is Oliver.  I remember you told me his name.  Will he come to me? children generally do,” said she in a shy sort of way, but still holding out her arms.  In her face and manner was that inexplicable motherliness which some girls have even while nursing their dolls —­some never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children—­ never!

Master Oliver guessed this by instinct, as children always do.  He looked at her intently, a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then broke into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed.  Christian, the solitary governess, first the worse than orphan, and then the real orphan, without a friend or relative in the world, felt a child clinging round her neck—­a child toward whom, by the laws of God and man, she was bound to fulfill all the duties of a mother—­duties which, from the time when she insisted on having a “big doll,” that she might dress it, not like a fine lady, but “like a baby,” had always seemed to her the very sweetest in all the world.  Her heart leaped with a sudden ecstasy, involuntary and uncontrollable.