Going into the dressing-room, she bathed her eyes with cold water; and she was still drying them before the mirror when the children came in, flushed and blooming, with their hands in Miss Polly Hatch’s.  What splendid children they were, she thought, looking wistfully at their eager faces.  Any father, any mother in the world, might be proud of them.  Fanny, the elder, was like an angel in her white fur coat and pert little cap, with her short golden curls like bunches of yellow silk on her shoulders, and her blue eyes, as grave as a philosopher’s, beaming softly under her thick jet-black lashes.  She was not particularly bright; she was, for her age, an unconscionable snob; but no one could deny that she was as beautiful as an angel to look at.

“Miss Polly wanted to kiss me, mamma, but I wouldn’t,” she said coolly as she examined a little bundle of sewing the seamstress had put down on the table.  “I needn’t kiss people if I don’t want to, need I?  Archibald doesn’t like to kiss either.  He’s naughty about it sometimes when ladies ask him to.  He doesn’t like scratchin’.  Isn’t it funny to call kissing, ‘scratchin’?  He told me Miss Polly scratched him and he didn’t like it.  He is afraid of her because she is so ugly.  Why are you ugly, Miss Polly?  Couldn’t you help it?  Did God make you ugly just for fun?  Why doesn’t he make everybody pretty?  I would if I were God.  What is God’s last name?  Archibald says it is Walker.  Is it Walker, mamma, and how does Archibald know?  Who told him—­”

When at last she was suppressed and sent out of the room with the nurse, she went at a dancing step, turning to make faces at Archibald, who stood stolidly at his mother’s knee, biting deep bites into a red apple Miss Polly had given him.  He was not a handsome child, even Gabriella admitted that his spectacles spoiled his appearance; but he was remarkably intelligent for his four years, and he was so strong and sturdy that he had never had a day’s illness in his life.  His face was unusually thoughtful and expressive, and his eyes, in spite of the disfiguring glasses, were large, brown, and beautiful, with something of the luminous softness of Cousin Jimmy’s.  Though she could not remember her father, it pleased Gabriella to think that Archibald was like him, and Miss Polly declared, with conviction, that he was “already his living image.”  Of the two children, for some obscure reason which she could not define and which was probably rooted in instinct, Gabriella had the greater tenderness for her son; and though she denied this preference to herself, Mrs. Fowler and Miss Polly had both commented upon it.  Even his temper, which was uncontrollable at times, endeared him to her, and the streak of savage in his nature seemed to awaken some dim ancestral memories in her brain.

“Thank Miss Polly for the apple and run away to Fanny,” said his mother, after she had held him pressed closely to her breast for a minute.  While she did so, she felt, with profound sadness, that her whole universe had dwindled down to her children.  Of all her happiness only her children remained to her.