On being told it was in the woodshed she started for it, and mistaking the door, was walking into a bedroom, when she was seized roughly by her father-in-law, whose face was white as ashes, and whose voice shook, as he said: 

“Not in there; this is the way.”

For an instant Geraldine looked at him in surprise he seemed so agitated; then, thinking to herself that probably his room was in disorder, and the bed unmade, she dismissed it from her mind, and went to investigate the well, whose water tasted like that at Carisbrooke Castle.

Half an hour in all she remained at the farm-house, and that was the only time she had honored it with her presence until the day when she came to take her boy away.

Not yet fully recovered from her dangerous illness, she assumed all the airs of an invalid, and kept her wraps around her, and shrank a little when her husband put her boy in her lap, and asked her if he was not a beauty, and did not do justice to Hannah’s care, and the brindle cow whose milk he had fed upon.  And in truth he was a healthy, beautiful child, with eyes as blue as the skies of June, and light chestnut hair, which lay in thick curls upon his head.  But he was strange to Geraldine, and she was strange to him, and after regarding her a moment with his great blue eyes, he turned toward Hannah, and with a quivering lip began to cry for her.  And Hannah took him in her arms and hugging him to her bosom, felt that her heart was breaking.  She loved him so much, he had been so much company for her, and had helped to drive away in part, the horror with which her life was invested, and now he was going from her; all she had to love in the wide world, and so far as she knew, the only living being that loved her with a pure, unselfish love.

“Oh, brother! oh, sister!” she cried, as she covered the baby’s dimpled hands with kisses, “don’t take him from me; let me have him; let him stay awhile longer.  I shall die here alone with baby gone.”

But Mrs. Geraldine said “No,” very decidedly, for though as yet she cared but little for her child, she cared a great deal for the proprieties, and her friends were beginning to wonder at the protracted absence of the boy; so she must take him from poor Hannah, who tied on his scarlet cloak and cap of costly lace, and carried him to the carriage and put him into the arms of the red-haired German woman who was hereafter to be his nurse and win his love from her.

Then the carriage drove off, but, as long as it was in sight, Hannah stood just where it had left her, watching it with a feeling of such utter desolation as she had never felt before.

“Oh, baby, baby! come back to me!” she moaned piteously.  “What shall I do without you?”

“God will comfort you, my daughter.  He can be more to you than baby was,” the old father said to her, and she replied: 

“I know that.  Yes, but just now I cannot pray, and I am so desolate.”