● ● ●  legacy of importance she would carry back from her brief marriage was Glover’s unborn child. The only place for her to go was “home.”

Even in the midst of her earlier happiness, home had been reaching out to draw her back. For one thing, there had been family letters, filled with love and anxiety about her health. Mark had written with obvious misgivings, gravely exhorting the young couple: “Give your hearts to God and consult duty and if it should be to quit that unhealthy clime and come to a better it would be pleasing to me.” Abigail Baker’s letters also gave counsel, though in a gentler fashion: “Dear child receive instruction and in return impart some to your dear George and be happy.” “Dear Child be faithfull to yourself and you will gain a rich reward.”³

Unfortunately Abigail found it hard to think of her youngest daughter as other than a little girl. She was glad to hear, she had written in February, that George, like a mother, “tries to make you a good little girl.”⁴ In the increasingly stifling atmosphere of the mid-nineteenth century there was little recognition of the emotional hazards of such an attitude, and for all that she owed to her mother’s love, Mrs. Glover was to have a struggle to escape the thralldom that came from this well-meant but excessive protectiveness.

In May Abigail had written, with a touch of quaint irony, that her “ever dear Child” would undoubtedly be glad “to hear again from your aged mother in her own Ancient style of communication,” and then she had poured out the loneliness she felt at being separated from Mary: