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Jules had been carried down-stairs and laid on a couch in the corner of the room where he could see the tree to its best advantage. Beside him sat his great-aunt, Désiré, dressed in a satin gown of silvery gray that had been her mother's, and looking as if she had just stepped out from the frame of the portrait up-stairs.
We managed to convince the child that we were doing our best and what was best for her mother and that her mother's ravings would quiet and that she might regain her reason and health. I induced both children to return to their bed and shut and bolted their door. Agathemer and I, by turns, and twice again each helping the other, kept the poor woman in her bed all night.
In spite of her mother's despair over her clothes Virgie was dressed, or at least had been dressed at breakfast time, in a clean white frock, low shoes and white stockings, although all now showed signs of strenuous usage. Clutched to her breast as she ran up to her mother's side was "Susan Jemima," her one beloved possession and her doll.
She had seen her child pressed to the arms of strangers and welcomed to her new home. She was no longer hers. All the sweet ties of nature had been rudely severed, and she had been forced to consign her, in the very bloom of youth and beauty, at the very age in which she most required a mother's care, and when she had but just fulfilled the promise of her childhood, to a living tomb.
"If Miss Allison consents to take a mother's place to you, I am sure your own mamma, if she could speak to you, would tell you she deserved to have the title; and it would hurt us both very much if you refused to give it. Indeed, my daughter, I cannot ask her to come to us unless you will promise to do so, and to love and obey, her just as you do me. Will you?"
But I thought I heard your mother's voice when I came in " "She often comes in about dressing time to see me in a new frock. How heavenly that you will always go with me." Her voice shook a little and she leaned over to smooth a possible wrinkle in her girdle. "Will you come down to the library? We are rather early."
At last the tears came to her relief, and she sobbed pitifully. "If you had only known her goodness," she cried, "her self-sacrificing devotion, her pure, kind heart! She was the best friend I ever had, and how she loved that unhappy boy! She was more his mother than I, for she gave him all a mother's love and all a mother's care and attention. Why did I let her go with him?
The clock downstairs gave the only sound I heard, as it marked the footsteps of the dark angel coming nearer and nearer. Twice my mother's lips parted as if to speak; but though I bent down to catch her words, I could hear no sound. So, as I sat and watched her waxen face, all the sweet memories of her came back in a sad, reproachful train.
"Then 'twill be a long-haired girl," Maren declared definitely. "And well on the way she must be, for the hair to stick in the mother's throat." It was a beautiful September day.
So the paths of Katherine and Elizabeth were strewn with thorns and stumbling-blocks from the outset, and, unfortunately, they were not the girls to see and avoid them, or even guess they were there until they fell over them. Anna, having been brought up under her mother's eye, was, of course, quite, quite different; Anna was really a credit to the care which had been lavished on her.
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