In her face and manner was that inexplicable motherliness which some girls have even while nursing their dolls -- some never; ay, though they may boast of a houseful of children-- never! Master Oliver guessed this by instinct, as children always do.

He looked at her intently, a queer, mischievous, yet penetrating look; then broke into a broad, genial laugh, quite Bacchic and succumbed.
Christian, the solitary governess, first the worse than orphan, and then the real orphan, without a friend or relative in the world, felt a child clinging round her neck--a child toward whom, by the laws of God and man, she was bound to fulfill all the duties of a mother--duties which, from the time when she insisted on having a "big doll," that she might dress it, not like a fine lady, but "like a baby," had always seemed to her the very sweetest in all the world.

Her heart leaped with a sudden ecstasy, involuntary and uncontrollable.
"My bonny boy!" she murmured, kissing the top of that billowy curl which extended from brow to crown--"my curl"-- for Oliver immediately and proudly pointed it to her.

"And to think that his mother never saw him.

Poor thing! poor thing!" Dr.Grey turned away to the window.