At last growing weary and discouraged, he turned away and said, “No, ma’ll never come home again; Maggie said she wouldn’t.”

Upon the carriage road which wound from the street to the house there was the sound of coming wheels, and Rachel, seizing Willie, bore him to the front door, exclaiming, “An’ faith, Willie, don’t you see her?  That’s your mother, honey, with the black gown.”

But Willie saw only the wild eyes of Lenora, who caught him in her arms, overwhelming him with caresses.  “Let me go, Leno,” said he, “I want to see my ma.  Where is she?”

A smile of scorn curled Lenora’s lips as she released him, and leading him toward her mother, she said, “There she is; there’s your ma.  Now hold up your head and make a bow.”

Willie’s lip quivered, his eyes filled with tears, and hiding his face in his apron, he sobbed, “I want my own ma—­the one they shut up in a big black box.  Where is she, Leno?”

Mr. Hamilton took Willie on his knee, and tried to explain to him how that now his own mother was dead, he had got a new one, who would love him and be kind to him.  Then putting him down, he said, “Go, my son, and speak to her, won’t you?”

Willie advanced rather cautiously toward the black silk figure, which reached out its hand, saying, “Dear Willie, you’ll love me a little, won’t you?”

“Yes, if you are good to me,” was the answer, which made the new stepmother mentally exclaim, “A young rebel, I know,” while Lenora, bending between the two, whispered emphatically: 

“She shall be good to you!”

And soon, in due order, the servants were presented to their new mistress.  Some were disposed to like her, others eyed her askance, and old Polly Pepper, the black cook, who had been in the family ever since Mr. Hamilton’s first marriage, returned her salutation rather gruffly, and then, stalking back to the kitchen, muttered to, those who followed her, “I don’t like her face nohow; she looks just like the milk snakes, when they stick their heads in at the door.”

“But you knew how she looked before,” said Lucy, the chambermaid.

“I know it,” returned Polly; “but when she was here nussin’ I never noticed her, more I would any on you; for who’d of thought that Mr. Hamilton would marry her, when he knows, or or’to know, that nusses ain’t fust cut, nohow; and you may depend on’t, things ain’t a-goin’ to be here as they used to be.”

Here Rachel started up, and related the circumstance of Margaret’s refusing to see “that little evil-eyed-lookin-varmint, with curls almost like Polly’s.”  Lucy, too, suddenly remembered something which she had seen, or heard, or made up—­so that Mrs. Carter had not been an hour in the coveted homestead ere there was mutiny against her afloat in the kitchen; “But,” said Aunt Polly, “I ’vises you all to be civil till she sasses you fust!”

“My dear, what room can Lenora have for her own?” asked Mrs. Hamilton, as we must now call her, the morning following her marriage.