She had smiled in his face, and had gone
every other day to meet her lover.
Clarissa stayed with her child all that night. The servants would wonder
and speculate, no doubt. She knew that; but she could not bring herself
to leave him. She had all manner of fantastic fears about him. They would
steal him from her in the night, perhaps. That order of Daniel Granger's
about Thursday morning might be only a ruse. She laid herself down upon a
sofa near the cot, and pretended to sleep, until the nurse had gone to bed,
after endless fussings and rustlings and movings to and fro, that were
torture to Mrs. Granger's nerves; and then listened and watched all the
night through.
No one came. The wintry morning dawned, and found her child still
slumbering sweetly, the rosy lips ever so slightly parted, golden-tinted
lashes lying on the round pink cheeks. She smiled at her own folly, as she
sat watching him in that welcome daylight. What had she expected? Daniel
Granger was not an ogre. He could not take her child from her.
_Her_ child! The thought that the boy was _his_ child very rarely presented
itself to her. Yet it had been suggested rather forcibly by those bitter
words of her husband's: "Do you think there is anything in common between
my son and you, after to-night?"
For Daniel Granger and herself there might be parting, an eternal
severance; but there could be no creature so cruel as to rob her of her
child.
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