“My bonny boy!” she murmured, kissing the top of that billowy curl which extended from brow to crown—­“my curl”—­for Oliver immediately and proudly pointed it to her.  “And to think that his mother never saw him.  Poor thing! poor thing!”

Dr. Grey turned away to the window.  What remembrances, bitter or sweet, came over the widower’s heart, Heaven knows!  But he kept them between himself and Heaven, as he did all things that were incommunicable and inevitable, and especially all things that could have given pain to any human being.  He only said on returning,

“I knew, Christian, from the first, that you would be a good mother to my children.”

She looked up at him, the tears in her eyes, but with a great light shining in them too.

“I will try.”

Poor Christian!  If her hasty marriage, or any other mistake of her life, needed pardon, surely it might be won for the earnest sincerity of this vow, and for its self-forgetful, utter humility—­“I will try.”

For another half hour, at her entreaty, the children staid, though Letitia and Arthur never relaxed from their dignified decorum farther than to inform her that they were sometimes called “Titia” and “Atty;” that their nurse was named Phillis; and that she had remained in the carriage because “she said she would not come in.”  Still, having expected nothing, the young step-mother was not disappointed.  And when the three left, Oliver having held up his rosy mouth voluntarily for “a good large kiss,” the sweetness of the caress lingered on her mouth like a chrism of consecration, sanctifying her for these new duties which seemed to have been sent to her without her choice, almost without her volition; for she often felt, when she paused to thing at all, as if in the successive links of circumstances which had brought about her marriage, she had been a passive agent, led on step by step, like a person half asleep.  Would she ever awake?

When Mrs. Ferguson, re-entering, ready with any amount of sympathy, found the young step-mother kissing her hand to the retreating carriage with a composed smile, which asked no condolence, and offered no confidences, the good lady was, to say the least, surprised.  “But,” as she afterward confessed to at least two dozen of her most intimate friends, “there always was something so odd, so different from most young ladies about Miss.  Oakley.”  However, to the young lady herself she said nothing, except suggesting, rather meekly, that it was time to change her dress.

“And just once more let me beg you to take my shawl—­my very best—­ instead of your own, which you have had a year and a half.  Ah!” sighing, “if you had only spent more money on your wedding clothes!”

“How could I?” said Christian, and stopped, seeing Dr. Grey enter.  This was the one point on which she had resisted him.  She could not accept her trousseau from her husband’s generosity.  It had been the last struggle of that fierce, poverty-nurtured independence, which nothing short of perfect love could have extinguished into happy humility, and she had held to her point resolute and hard; so much so, that when, with a quiet dignity peculiarly his own, Dr. Grey had yielded, she had afterward almost felt ashamed.  And even now a slight blush came in her cheek when she heard him say cheerfully,