“Give them to me;” Rose said, “and then you may go up and tell Mrs. Ruston she may have them in a few minutes.”

She took them into her bedroom and laid them side by side on her bed.  They had thriven finely—­justified, as far as that went, Harriet’s decision in favor of bottle feeding.  Had she died back there in that bed of pain, never come out of the ether at all, they’d still be just like this—­plump, placid, methodical.  Rose had thought of that a hundred times, but it wasn’t what she was thinking of now.

The thing that caught her as she stood looking down on them, was the wave of sudden pity.  She saw them suddenly as persons with the long road all ahead of them, as a boy and a girl, a youth and a maid, a man and a woman.  They were destined to have their hopes and loves, fears, triumphs, tragedies perhaps.  The boy there, Rodney, might have to face, some day, the situation his father confronted now; might have to come back into an empty home, and turn a stiff inexpressive face on a coolly curious world.  Little Portia there might find herself, some day, gazing with wide seared eyes, at a life some unexpected turn of the wheel of Fate had thrust her, all unprepared, into the midst of.  Or it might be her fate to love without attracting love—­to drain all the blood out of her life in necessary sacrifices; to wither that some one else might have a chance to grow.  Those possibilities were all there before these two solemn, staring, little helpless things on the bed.  What toys of Chance they were!

She’d never thought of them like that before.  The baby she had looked forward to—­the baby she hadn’t had—­had never been thought of that way either.  It was to be something to provide her, Rose, with an occupation; to enable her to interpret her life in new terms; to make an alchemic change in the very substance of it.  The transmutation hadn’t taken place.  She surmised now, dimly, that she hadn’t deserved it should.

“You’ve never had a mother at all, you poor little mites,” she said.  “But you’re going to have one some day.  You’re going to be able to come to her with your troubles, because she’ll have had troubles herself.  She’ll help you bear your hurts, because she’s had hurts of her own.  And she’ll be able to teach you to stand the gaff, because she’s stood it herself.”

For the first time since they were born, she was thinking of their need of her rather than of her need of them and with that thought, came for the first time, the surge of passionate maternal love that she had waited for, so long in vain.  There was, suddenly, an intolerable ache in her heart that could only have been satisfied by crushing them up against her breast; kissing their hands—­their feet.

Rose stood there quivering, giddy with the force of it.  “Oh, you darlings!” she said.  “But wait—­wait until I deserve it!” And without touching them at all, she went to the door and opened it.  Mrs. Ruston and Doris were both waiting in the hall.