"Not as well furnished as my cook's room," she thought, but she tried to be gracious, and said how clean every thing was, and asked Hannah if she did not get very tired doing her own work, and praised the dahlias growing by the south door, and ate a few plums, and drank some water, which she said was so cold that it made her think of the famous well at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight.
"Your well must be very deep. Where is it?" she asked, not because she cared, but because she must say something.
On being told it was in the woodshed she started for it, and mistaking the door, was walking into a bedroom, when she was seized roughly by her father-in-law, whose face was white as ashes, and whose voice shook, as he said: "Not in there; this is the way."
For an instant Geraldine looked at him in surprise he seemed so agitated; then, thinking to herself that probably his room was in disorder, and the bed unmade, she dismissed it from her mind, and went to investigate the well, whose water tasted like that at Carisbrooke Castle.
Half an hour in all she remained at the farm-house, and that was the only time she had honored it with her presence until the day when she came to take her boy away.
Not yet fully recovered from her dangerous illness, she assumed all the airs of an invalid, and kept her wraps around her, and shrank a little when her husband put her boy in her lap, and asked her if he was not a beauty, and did not do justice to Hannah's care, and the brindle cow whose milk he had fed upon. And in truth he was a healthy, beautiful child, with eyes as blue as the skies of June, and light chestnut hair, which lay in thick curls upon his head. But he was strange to Geraldine, and she was strange to him, and after regarding her a moment with his great blue eyes, he turned toward Hannah, and with a quivering lip began to cry for her. And Hannah took him in her arms and hugging him to her bosom, felt that her heart was breaking. She loved him so much, he had been so much company for her, and had helped to drive away in part, the horror with which her life was invested, and now he was going from her; all she had to love in the wide world, and so far as she knew, the only living being that loved her with a pure, unselfish love.