“She never told me so,” laughed Sally, “but I strongly suspect it.  I don’t disguise the fact that I consider Mrs. Webb to be a terror, and Eugie’s a long way off from saintship.”

“I hardly think that Mrs. Webb would consent to join our colony,” observed Nicholas indifferently.

“May Kingsborough long enjoy her rule,” added Juliet.  “I hear that she has grown quite amiable towards the judge since she prophesied that he would have chronic gout and he had it.”

“It would be so nice of them to marry each other,” suggested Carrie with an eye for matrimonial interests.  “You needn’t shake your head, mamma.  Aunt Sally said the same thing to Uncle Tom.”

She was standing on the hearth rug in her walking gown, slowly fastening her gloves.  Sally looked at her and laughed in her nervous way.

“Well, I confess that it did cross my mind,” she admitted.  “Tom, like all men, believed Mrs. Webb to be a martyr until I convinced him that she martyred others.”

“Oh, he still believes it behind your back,” said Nicholas.

Juliet turned upon him frankly.  “It’s a shame to destroy wifely confidence,” she protested.  “Sally hasn’t been married long enough to know that the only way to convince a husband is to argue against oneself.”

Her head rested upon the cushions of her chair, and her pretty foot was on the brass fender.  There was a cordial warmth about her which turned the simple room into home for even the casual caller.  The matronly grace of her movements evoked the memory of infancy and motherhood; to Nicholas Burr she seemed, in her beauty and her abundance, the supreme expression of a type—­of the joyous racial mother of all men.

Her youngest child, a girl of three, that she called “baby,” had come in from a walk and was standing at her knee in white cap and cloak and mittens, her hand clutching Juliet’s dress, her solemn eyes on the governor.  He had tried to induce her to approach, but she held off and regarded him without a smile.

“Now, now, baby,” pleaded Juliet, “who fed the bunnies with you the other day?”

“Man,” responded the baby gravely.

“Who gave you nice nuts for the dear bunnies?”

“Man.”

“Who carried you all round the pretty square?”

“Man.”

“Who gave you that lovely picture book full of animals?”

“Man.”

“Then don’t you love the kind man?”

“Noth.”

“Yes, you do—­you’ve forgotten.  Go and speak to him.”

The child approached gravely to make a grab at his watch-chain; he lifted her to his knee, and friendship was established.  They were at peace a moment later when a voice was heard in the hall, and the curtains were swung back as Eugenia Webb entered, tall and glowing, her head rising from a collar of fur.  She brought with her the breath of frost, and the winter red was in her cheeks, fading slowly as she sat down and threw off her wraps.  He saw then that she looked older than he thought and that her elastic figure had settled into matronly lines.