Mary suffered
most severely in childbirth, and died a few weeks afterwards. Templeton
at first was inconsolable, but worldly thoughts were great comforters.
He had done all that conscience could do to atone a sin, and he was
freed from a most embarrassing dilemma, and from a temporary banishment
utterly uncongenial and unpalatable to his habits and ideas. But now he
had a child,--a legitimate child, successor to his name, his wealth; a
first-born child,--the only one ever sprung from him, the prop and
hope of advancing years! On this child he doted with all that paternal
passion which the hardest and coldest men often feel the most for their
own flesh and blood--for fatherly love is sometimes but a transfer of
self-love from one fund to another.

Yet this child--this darling that he longed to show to the whole
world--it was absolutely necessary, for the present, that he should
conceal and disown. It had happened that Sarah's husband died of his own
excesses a few weeks before the birth of Templeton's child, she having
herself just recovered from her confinement; Sarah was therefore free
forever from her husband's vigilance and control. To her care the
destined heiress was committed, and her own child put out to nurse. And
this was the woman and this the child who had excited so much benevolent
curiosity in the breasts of the worthy clergyman and the three old maids
of C-----.* Alarmed at Sarah's account of the scrutiny of the parson,
and at his own rencontre with that hawk-eyed pastor, Templeton lost no
time in changing the abode of the nurse; and to her new residence had
the banker bent his way, with rod and angle, on that evening which
witnessed his adventure with Luke Darvil.** When Mr. Templeton first
met Alice, his own child was only about thirteen or fourteen months
old,--but little older than Alice's. If the beauty of Mrs. Leslie's
_protege_ first excited his coarser nature, her maternal tenderness,
her anxious care for her little one, struck a congenial chord in the
father's heart. It connected him with her by a mute and unceasing
sympathy. Templeton had felt so deeply the alarm and pain of illicit
love, he had been (as he profanely believed) saved from the brink of
public shame by so signal an interference of grace, that he resolved no
more to hazard his good name and his peace of mind upon such perilous
rocks. The dearest desire at his heart was to have his daughter under
his roof,--to fondle, to play with her