One man, at any rate, so thought.  At twilight, one evening, Thorne was surprised by a visit from a demure Barchester hardware dealer, whom he did not remember ever to have addressed before.  This was the former lover of the poor Mary Scatcherd.  He had a proposal to make and it was this:—­if Mary would consent to leave the country at once, to leave it without notice from her brother, or talk or eclat on the matter, he would sell all that he had, marry her, and emigrate.  There was but one condition; she must leave her baby behind her.  The hardware-man could find it in his heart to be generous, to be generous and true to his love; but he could not be generous enough to father the seducer’s child.

‘I could never abide it, sir, if I took it,’ said he; ’and she,—­why in course she would always love it the best.’

In praising his generosity, who can mingle any censure for such manifest prudence?  He would still make her the wife of his bosom, defiled in the eyes of the world as she had been; but she must be to him the mother of his own children, not the mother of another’s child.

And now again our doctor had a hard task to win through.  He saw at once that it was his duty to use his utmost authority to induce the poor girl to accept such an offer.  She liked the man; and here was opened to her a course which would have been most desirable, even before her misfortune.  But it is hard to persuade a mother to part with her first babe; harder, perhaps, when the babe had been so fathered and so born than when the world has shone brightly on its earliest hours.  She at first refused stoutly:  she sent a thousand loves, a thousand thanks, profusest acknowledgements for his generosity to the man who showed her that he loved her so well; but Nature, she said, would not let her leave her child.

‘And what will you do for her here, Mary?’ said the doctor.  Poor Mary replied to him with a deluge of tears.

’She is my niece,’said the doctor, taking up the tiny infant in his huge hands; ’she is already the nearest thing, the only thing that I have in the world.  I am her uncle, Mary.  If you will go with this man I will be father to her and mother to her.  Of what bread I eat, she shall eat; of what cup I drink, she shall drink.  See, Mary, here is the Bible;’ and he covered the book with his hand, ’Leave her to me, and by this word she shall be my child.’

The mother consented at last; left her baby with the doctor, married, and went to America.  All this was consummated before Roger Scatcherd was liberated from jail.  Some conditions the doctor made.  The first was, that Scatcherd should not know his sister’s child was thus disposed of.  Dr Thorne, in undertaking to bring up the baby, did not choose to encounter any girl’s relations on the other side.  Relations she would undoubtedly have had none had she been left to live or die as a workhouse bastard; but should the doctor succeed in life, should he ultimately be able to make this girl the darling of his own house, and then the darling of some other house, should she live and win the heart of some man whom the doctor might delight to call his friend and nephew; then relations might spring up whose ties would not advantageous.