Rose, in the passionate surge of gratified desire that came with the sight of them, caught them from him, crushed them up tight against her breast—­and frightened them half to death.  So that without dissimulation, they howled and brought Miss French flying to the rescue.

Rose didn’t make a tragedy of it; managed a smile at herself, though she suspected she’d cry when she got the chance, and subjected her ideas to an instantaneous revision.  They were—­persons, those two funnily indignant little mites, with their own ideas, their own preferences, and the perfectly adequate conviction of being entitled to them.  How would she herself have liked it, to have a total stranger, fifteen feet high or so, snatch at her like that?

She was rather apologetic all day, and got her reward; especially from the boy, who was an adventurous and rather truculent baby, much she fancied, as his father must once have been, and who took to her more quickly than the girl did.  Indeed, the second Rodney fell in love with her almost as promptly as his father had done before him.  But little Portia wasn’t very far behind.  Two days sufficed for the conquest of the pair of them.

The really disquieting discovery awaited the time when the wire-edge of novelty about this adventure in motherhood had worn off; when she could bathe them, dress them, feed them their very strictly regimented meals, without being spurred to the highest pitch of alertness by the fear of making a mistake—­forgetting something, like the juice of a half orange at ten o’clock in the morning, the omission of which might have—­who knew what disastrous consequences!

That attitude can’t last any woman long, and Rose, with her wonderfully clever hands, her wits trained—­as the wits of persons who had worked for John Galbraith were always trained—­not to be told the same thing twice, her pride keeping in sharp focus the determination that Rodney should see that she could be as good a nurse as Miss French—­Rose wore off that nervous tenseness over her new job very quickly.  Within a week she had a routine established that was noiseless—­frictionless.

But do you remember how aghast she was over the forty weeks John Galbraith had talked about as the probable run of The Girl Up-stairs; her consternation over the idea of just going on doing the same thing over and over again, “around and round, like a horse at the end of a pole”?  What she would like to do, she had told him, now that this was done, was to begin on something else.

Well, it was with something the same feeling of consternation that, having thrown herself heart and soul into the task of planning and setting in motion a routine for two year-and-a-half-old babies, she found herself straightening up and saying “What next?” And realizing, that as far as this job was concerned, there was no “next.”  The supreme merit of her care, from now on, would be—­barring emergencies—­the placid continuation of