Despond in possible
heirs. 'What has happened once, when all seemed so fair, may happen
again,' he said to himself. 'I'll risk my name no more.' So he
abstained from marriage, and overcame his wish for a lineal descendant to
follow him in the ownership of Stapleford.

Timothy had scarcely noticed the unfortunate child that his wife had
borne, after arranging for a meagre fulfilment of his promise to her to
take care of the boy, by having him brought up in his house.
Occasionally, remembering this promise, he went and glanced at the child,
saw that he was doing well, gave a few special directions, and again went
his solitary way. Thus he and the child lived on in the Stapleford
mansion-house till two or three years had passed by. One day he was
walking in the garden, and by some accident left his snuff-box on a
bench. When he came back to find it he saw the little boy standing
there; he had escaped his nurse, and was making a plaything of the box,
in spite of the convulsive sneezings which the game brought in its train.
Then the man with the encrusted heart became interested in the little
fellow's persistence in his play under such discomforts; he looked in the
child's face, saw there his wife's countenance, though he did not see his
own, and fell into thought on the piteousness of childhood--particularly
of despised and rejected childhood, like this before him.

From that hour, try as he would to counteract the feeling, the human
necessity to love something or other got the better of what he had called
his wisdom, and shaped itself in a tender anxiety for the youngster
Rupert. This name had been given him by his dying mother when, at her
request, the child was baptized in her chamber, lest he should not
survive for public baptism; and her husband had never thought of it as a
name of any significance till, about this time, he learnt by accident
that it was the name of the young Marquis of Christminster, son of the
Duke of Southwesterland, for whom Annetta had cherished warm feelings
before her marriage. Recollecting some wandering phrases in his wife's
last words, which he had not understood at the time, he perceived at last
that this was the person to whom she had alluded when affording him a
clue to little Rupert's history.

He would sit in silence for hours with the child, being no great speaker
at the best of times; but the boy, on his part, was too ready with his
tongue for any break in discourse to arise