The child was delighted, as he expected.  Mr. Hamlin placed it in a sitting posture on the edge of his bed, and put an ostentatious paternal arm around it.

“But you’re alive, ain’t you?” he said to the child.

This subtle witticism convulsed her.  “I’m a little girl,” she gurgled.

“I see; her mother?”

“Ess.”

“And who’s your mother?”

“Mammy.”

“Mrs. Rivers?”

The child nodded until her ringlets were shaken on her cheek.  After a moment she began to laugh bashfully and with repression, yet as Mr. Hamlin thought a little mischievously.  Then as he looked at her interrogatively she suddenly caught hold of the ruffle of his sleeve.

“Oo’s got on mammy’s nighty.”

Mr. Hamlin started.  He saw the child’s obvious mistake and actually felt himself blushing.  It was unprecedented—­it was the sheerest weakness—­it must have something to do with the confounded air.

“I grieve to say you are deeply mistaken—­it is my very own,” he returned with great gravity.  Nevertheless, he drew the coverlet close over his shoulder.  But here he was again attracted by another face at the half-opened door—­a freckled one, belonging to a boy apparently a year or two older than the girl.  He was violently telegraphing to her to come away, although it was evident that he was at the same time deeply interested in the guest’s toilet articles.  Yet as his bright gray eyes and Mr. Hamlin’s brown ones met, he succumbed, as the girl had, and walked directly to the bedside.  But he did it bashfully—­as the girl had not.  He even attempted a defensive explanation.

“She hadn’t oughter come in here, and mar wouldn’t let her, and she knows it,” he said with superior virtue.

“But I asked her to come as I’m asking you,” said Mr. Hamlin promptly, “and don’t you go back on your sister or you’ll never be president of the United States.”  With this he laid his hand on the boy’s tow head, and then, lifting himself on his pillow to a half-sitting posture, put an arm around each of the children, drawing them together, with the doll occupying the central post of honor.  “Now,” continued Mr. Hamlin, albeit in a voice a little faint from the exertion, “now that we’re comfortable together I’ll tell you the story of the good little boy who became a pirate in order to save his grandmother and little sister from being eaten by a wolf at the door.”

But, alas! that interesting record of self-sacrifice never was told.  For it chanced that Melinda Bird, Mrs. Rivers’s help, following the trail of the missing children, came upon the open door and glanced in.  There, to her astonishment, she saw the domestic group already described, and to her eyes dominated by the “most beautiful and perfectly elegant” young man she had ever seen.  But let not the incautious reader suppose that she succumbed as weakly as her artless charges to these fascinations.  The character and antecedents of that young man had been already delivered to her in the kitchen by the other help.  With that single glance she halted; her eyes sought the ceiling in chaste exaltation.  Falling back a step, she called in ladylike hauteur and precision, “Mary Emmeline and John Wesley.”