Publisher's Synopsis
The child which Eliza Floyd left behind her, when she was so suddenly taken away from all earthlyprosperity and happiness, was christened Aurora. The romantic-sounding name had been a fancy ofpoor Eliza's; and there was no caprice of hers, however trifling, that had not always been sacred withher adoring husband, and that was not doubly sacred now. The actual intensity of the widower'sgrief was known to no creature in this lower world. His nephews and his nephews' wives paid himpertinacious visits of condolence; nay, one of these nieces by marriage, a good motherly creature, devoted to her husband, insisted on seeing and comforting the stricken man. Heaven knowswhether her tenderness did convey any comfort to that shipwrecked soul! She found him like a manwho had suffered from a stroke of paralysis, torpid, almost imbecile. Perhaps she took the wisestcourse that could possibly have been taken. She said little to him upon the subject of his affliction;but visited him frequently, patiently sitting opposite to him for hours at a time, he and she talking ofall manner of easy conventional topics, -the state of the country, the weather, a change in theministry, and such subjects as were so far remote from the grief of his life, that a less careful handthan Mrs. Alexander Floyd's could have scarcely touched upon the broken chords of that ruinedinstrument, the widower's heart.It was not until six months after Eliza's death that Mrs. Alexander ventured to utter her name; butwhen she did speak of her, it was with no solemn hesitation, but tenderly and familiarly, as if she hadbeen accustomed to talk of the dead. She saw at once that she had done right. The time had comefor the widower to feel relief in speaking of the lost one; and from that hour Mrs. Alexander becamea favourite with her uncle. Years after, he told her that, even in the sullen torpor of his grief, he hadhad a dim consciousness that she pitied him, and that she was "a good woman." This good womancame that very evening into the big room, where the banker sat by his lonely hearth, with a baby inher arms, -a pale-faced child, with great wondering black eyes, which stared at the rich man insombre astonishment; a solemn-faced, ugly baby, which was to grow by-and-by into Aurora Floyd, the heroine of my st