“You’re so lovely, Rachael,” said her friend affectionately.  “It doesn’t seem right to have anything ever trouble anyone so pretty!”

Rachael only smiled doubtfully in answer, but Derry and Jim talked all the way home, their mother listening in silence.  She found their conversation infinitely more amusing when uninfluenced by her.  Both were naturally observant, Jim logical and reasonable, Derry always misled by his fancy and his dreams.  When Tim was a lion, he was a lion who lived in the Gregory nursery, sat in the chairs that belonged to the Gregory children, and preyed upon their toys, as toys.  But Derry was a beast of another calibre.  The polished nursery floor was the still water of jungle pools, and the cribs were trees which a hideous and ferocious beast, radically differing in every way from little Gerald Gregory, climbed at will.  Jim was a lion who liked to be interrupted by grown-ups, who was laughing at his make-believe all the time, but Derry was so frightfully in earnest as to often terrify himself, and almost always impress his brother, with his roarings and ravaging.

To-day their conversation ran along pleasantly; they were companionable little brothers, and only unmanageable when separated.

“All the men walking home will get their feet horrid an’ wet,” said Jim, “and then the ladies will scold ’em!”

“This would be a great, big ocean for a fairy,” Derry commented, flicking a wide puddle with a well-protected little foot.  “Jim,” he added in an anxious undertone, “could a fairy drown?”

“Not if he had his swimming belt on,” Jim said hardily.

“All the fairies have to take little white rose leaves, and make themselves swimming belts,” Derry said dreamily, “’r else their mothers won’t let them go swimming, will they, Mother?”

They did not wait for her answer, and Rachael was free to return to her own thoughts.  But the interruption roused her, and she watched the little pair with pleasure as they trotted before her on the drying sidewalks.  Derry was blond and Jim dark, yet they looked alike, both with Rachael’s dark, expressive eyes, and with their father’s handsome mouth and sudden, appealing smile.  But Rachael fancied that her oldest son was most like his father in type, and found it hard to be as stern with Jim as she was with the impulsive reckless, eager Derry, whose faults were more apt to be her own.

To-night she went with them to the nursery, where their little table was already set for supper and their small white beds already neatly turned down.

“Mother’s going to give us our baths!” shouted Jim.  Both boys looked at her eagerly; Rachael smiled doubtfully.

“Mother’s afraid that she will have to dress, to meet Daddy downtown,” she began regretfully, when old Mary interposed respectfully: 

“Excuse me, Mrs. Gregory.  But Dennison took a message from Doctor this afternoon.  I happen to know it because Louise asked me if I didn’t think she had better order dinner for you.  Doctor has been called to Albany on a case, and was to let you know when to expect him.”