And although she had lived in a very humble home, yet there was something about either it or her, or the people amongst whom she had been thrown during the last few years, which had so changed her, that whereas, six or seven years ago, you would have perceived that she was not altogether a lady by birth and education, yet now she might have been placed among the highest in the land, and would have been taken by the most critical judge for their equal, although ignorant of their conventional etiquette--an ignorance which she would have acknowledged in a simple child-like way, being unconscious of any false shame.
Her whole heart was in her boy.

She often feared that she loved him too much--more than God Himself--yet she could not bear to pray to have her love for her child lessened.

But she would kneel down by his little bed at night--at the deep, still midnight--with the stars that kept watch over Rizpah shining down upon her, and tell God what I have now told you, that she feared she loved her child too much, yet could not, would not, love him less; and speak to Him of her one treasure as she could speak to no earthly friend.

And so, unconsciously, her love for her child led her up to love to God, to the All-knowing, who read her heart.
It might be superstition--I dare say it was--but, somehow, she never lay down to rest without saying, as she looked her last on her boy, "Thy will, not mine, be done;" and even while she trembled and shrank with infinite dread from sounding the depths of what that will might be, she felt as if her treasure were more secure to waken up rosy and bright in the morning, as one over whose slumbers God's holy angels had watched, for the very words which she had turned away in sick terror from realising the night before.
Her daily absence at her duties to the Bradshaw children only ministered to her love for Leonard.

Everything does minister to love when its foundation lies deep in a true heart, and it was with an exquisite pang of delight that, after a moment of vague fear, (Oh, mercy! to myself I said, If Lucy should be dead!), she saw her child's bright face of welcome as he threw open the door every afternoon on her return home.