derived
pleasure from seeing this fine young woman, this interesting widow,
sitting mourning for his son. So he made much of her, and pushed her
sister Louisa at once into the background for her sake.

The sisters having married twin brothers, Mr. Walker's elder sons,
neither had looked on himself as heir to the exclusion of the other; but
Emily's pale morsel of a child was at once made more important than his
father had ever been. Louisa, staying also with her husband in the
house, was only the expectant mother of a grandson for him; and the rich
old man now began almost immediately to talk of how he should bring up
Emily's boy, and what he should do for him--taking for granted, from the
first, that his favourite daughter-in-law was to live with him and keep
his house.

Louisa took this change in Mr. Walker very wisely and sweetly--did not
even resent it, when, in the presence of his living son, he would
aggravate himself into lamentations over the dead one, as if in him he
had lost his all.

Sometimes he wondered a little himself at this quiescence--at the slight
impression he seemed to make on his son, whom he had fully intended to
rouse to remonstrance about it--at the tender way in which the young
wife ministered to her sister, and at the great change for the worse
that he soon began to observe in Emily's appearance.

Nobody liked to tell him the cause, and he would not see it; even when
it became an acknowledged fact, which every one else talked of, that
the little one was ill, he resolutely refused to see it; said the
weather was against a child born in India--blamed the east wind. Even
when the family doctor tried to let him know that the child was not
likely to be long for this world, he was angry, with all the
unreasonable volubility of a man who thinks others are deceiving him,
rather than grieved for the peril of the little life and the anguish of
the mother's heart.

Now came indeed "the rest of it." What a rending away of heart and life
it seemed to let go the object of this absorbing, satisfying love! Now
she was to lose, where the love had been bestowed; and she felt as if
death itself was in the bitter cup.

It was not till the child was actually passing away, after little more
than a fortnight's illness, that his grandfather could be brought to
believe in his danger. He had been heaping promises of what he would do
for him on the mother, as if to raise her courage. With kindly
wrong-headed obst