'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.
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