Clover in confidence. "To watch her lying there looking so radiant and so
peaceful and so interested in Katy's affairs, and never once seeming to
remember that except for that accident she too would have been a bride
and had a wedding! It's perfectly wonderful! Do you suppose she is never
sorry for herself? She seems the merriest of us all."

"I don't think she remembers herself often enough to be sorry. She is
always thinking of some one else, it seems to me."

"Well, I am glad to have seen her," added Rose, in a more serious tone
than was usual to her. "She and grandmamma are of a different order of
beings from the rest of the world. I don't wonder you and Katy always were
so good; you ought to be with such a Cousin Helen."

"I don't think we were as good as you make us out, but Cousin Helen has
really been one of the strong influences of our lives. She was the making
of Katy, when she had that long illness; and Katy has made the rest of
us."

Little Rose from the first moment became the delight of the household, and
especially of Amy Ashe, who could not do enough for her, and took her off
her mother's hands so entirely that Rose complained that she seemed to
have lost her child as well as her husband. She was a sedate little
maiden, and wonderfully wise for her years. Already, in some ways she
seemed older than her erratic little mother, of whom, in a droll fashion,
she assumed a sort of charge. She was a born housewife.

"Mamma, you have fordotten your wings," Clover would hear her saying.
"Mamma, you has a wip in your seeve, you must mend it," or "Mamma, don't
fordet dat your teys is in the top dwawer,"--all these reminders and
advices being made particularly comical by the baby pronunciation. Rose's
theory was that little Rose was a messenger from heaven sent to buffet her
and correct her mistakes.

"The bane and the antidote," she would say. "Think of my having a child
with powers of ratiocination!"

Rose came down the night of her arrival after a long, freshening nap,
looking rested and bonny in a pretty blue dress, and saying that as
little Rose too had taken a good sleep, she might sit up to tea if the
family liked. The family were only too pleased to have her do so. After
tea Rose carried her off, ostensibly to go to bed, but Clover heard a
great deal of confabulating and giggling in the hall and on the stairs,
and soon after, Rose returned, the door-bell rang loudly, and there
entered an astonishing v