it at twilight,
as from a room that held the dead. But into it we never went.

Mother was tired out that afternoon; for she had been on her feet all
day, busied in her loving cares to make our simple home as pleasant and
as welcome as home could be. But yet she stopped to dress us in our
Sunday clothes,--and no sinecure was it to dress three persistently
undressable children; Winthrop was a host in himself. "Auntie must see
us look our prettiest," she said.

She was a picture herself when she came down. She had taken off her
widow's cap and coiled her heavy hair low in her neck, and she always
looked like a queen in that lustreless black silk. I do not know why
these little things should have made such an impression on me then. They
are priceless to me now. I remember how she looked, framed there in the
doorway, while we were watching for the coach,--the late light ebbing in
golden tides over the grass at her feet, and touching her face now and
then through the branches of trees, her head bent a little, with eager,
parted lips, and the girlish color on her cheeks, her hand shading her
eyes as they strained for a sight of the lumbering coach. She must have
been a magnificent woman when she was young,--not unlike, I have heard
it said, to that far-off ancestress whose name she bore, and whose
sorrowful story has made her sorrowful beauty immortal. Somewhere abroad
there is a reclining statue of Queen Mary, to which, when my mother
stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong that the by-standers
clustered about her, whispering curiously. "Ah, mon Dieu!" said a little
Frenchman, aloud, "c'est une resurrection."

We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and Winthrop and I; for the
spirit of her own excitement had made us completely wild. Winthrop's
scream of delight when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught the first
sight of the old yellow coach, might have been heard a quarter of a
mile.

"Coming?" said mother, nervously, and stepped out to the gate, full in
the sunlight that crowned her like royal gold.

The coach lumbered on, and rattled up, and passed.

"Why, she hasn't come!" All the eager color died out of her face. "I am
so disappointed!" speaking like a troubled child, and turning slowly
into the house.

Then, after a while, she drew me aside from the others,--I was the
oldest, and she was used to make a sort of confidence between us,
instinctively, as it seemed, and often quite forgetting how very