self."

"But--the risk?"

"Oh," said Aggie, sublimely, "we all take it. Some of us don't know. I
did. That's all."

She drew a deep breath of relief and satisfaction. For four months, ever
since she had known that some such scene as this must come, she had known
that she would meet it this way.

"Hush," she said. "I think I hear the children."

IX

They came in, a pathetic little procession, three golden-haired couples,
holding one another's hands.

First, Arty and Emmy, then Catty and Baby, then Willie and Dick, all
solemn and shy. Baby turned his back on the strange aunt and burrowed into
his mother's lap. They were all silent but Dick. Dick wanted to know if
his Auntie liked birfdays, and if people gave her fings on her
birfday--pausing to simulate a delicate irrelevance before he announced
that _his_ birfday was to-morrow.

"Dickie, dear," said his mother, nervously, "we don't talk about our
birthdays before they've come."

She could not bear Susie to be able to say that one of her children had
given so gross a hint.

The children pressed round her, and her hands were soon at their proud and
anxious work: coaxing stray curls into their place; proving the strength
of the little arms; slipping a sock, to show the marbled rose of the round
limbs.

"Just feel Emmy's legs. She's as firm as firm. And look at Baby, how
beautifully he's made. They're all healthy. There isn't an unsweet,
unsound spot in one of them."

[Illustration: "'There isn't an unsweet, unsound spot in one
of them'"]

"No, no, they look it. They're magnificent. And they're you all over
again."

"Barbara wasn't. She was the very image of her father." Her love of him
conquered the stubborn silence of her grief, so that she did not shrink
from the beloved name.

"Susie," she said, when the little procession had, at its own petition,
filed solemnly out again, "you can't say you've seen too much of them."

Susie smiled sadly as she looked at the wreck that was poor Aggie. "No, my
dear; but I haven't seen quite enough of you. There isn't much left of
you, you know."

"Me?" She paused, and then broke out again, triumphant in her
justification: "No matter if there's nothing left of me. _They're_ alive."

She raised her head. Worn out and broken down she might be, but she was
the mother of superb children. Something stronger and more beautiful than
her lost youth flamed in her as she vindicated her mother