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 this world.

I am her uncle, Mary.