“I never did see anything so lovely in all my life before,” she told Clover in confidence.  “To watch her lying there looking so radiant and so peaceful and so interested in Katy’s affairs, and never once seeming to remember that except for that accident she too would have been a bride and had a wedding!  It’s perfectly wonderful!  Do you suppose she is never sorry for herself?  She seems the merriest of us all.”

“I don’t think she remembers herself often enough to be sorry.  She is always thinking of some one else, it seems to me.”

“Well, I am glad to have seen her,” added Rose, in a more serious tone than was usual to her.  “She and grandmamma are of a different order of beings from the rest of the world.  I don’t wonder you and Katy always were so good; you ought to be with such a Cousin Helen.”

“I don’t think we were as good as you make us out, but Cousin Helen has really been one of the strong influences of our lives.  She was the making of Katy, when she had that long illness; and Katy has made the rest of us.”

Little Rose from the first moment became the delight of the household, and especially of Amy Ashe, who could not do enough for her, and took her off her mother’s hands so entirely that Rose complained that she seemed to have lost her child as well as her husband.  She was a sedate little maiden, and wonderfully wise for her years.  Already, in some ways she seemed older than her erratic little mother, of whom, in a droll fashion, she assumed a sort of charge.  She was a born housewife.

“Mamma, you have fordotten your wings,” Clover would hear her saying.  “Mamma, you has a wip in your seeve, you must mend it,” or “Mamma, don’t fordet dat your teys is in the top dwawer,”—­all these reminders and advices being made particularly comical by the baby pronunciation.  Rose’s theory was that little Rose was a messenger from heaven sent to buffet her and correct her mistakes.

“The bane and the antidote,” she would say.  “Think of my having a child with powers of ratiocination!”

Rose came down the night of her arrival after a long, freshening nap, looking rested and bonny in a pretty blue dress, and saying that as little Rose too had taken a good sleep, she might sit up to tea if the family liked.  The family were only too pleased to have her do so.  After tea Rose carried her off, ostensibly to go to bed, but Clover heard a great deal of confabulating and giggling in the hall and on the stairs, and soon after, Rose returned, the door-bell rang loudly, and there entered an astonishing vision,—­little Rose, costumed as a Cupid or a carrier-pigeon, no one knew exactly which, with a pair of large white wings fastened on her shoulders, and dragging behind her by a loop of ribbon a sizeable basket quite full of parcels.

Straight toward Katy she went, and with her small hands behind her back and her blue eyes fixed full on Katy’s face, repeated with the utmost solemnity the following “poem:”