Indeed her mother was really happier than for many years, for the sense of failing in her husband’s charge had left her since she had seen Jock by his own free will on the road to the quest, and likely also to fulfil the moral, as well as the scientific, conditions attached to it.  She did feel as if her dream was being realised and the golden statues becoming warmed into life, and though her heart ached for Janet, she still hoped for her.  So, with a mother’s unfailing faith, she believed in Allen’s dawning future even while another sense within her marvelled, as she copied, at the acceptance of “The Single Eye.”  But then, was it not well-known that loving eyes see the most faults, and was not an editor the best judge of popularity?

She had her scheme too.  She had taken lessons some years ago at Rome in her old art of modelling, and knew her eye and taste had improved in the galleries.  She had once or twice amused the household by figures executed by her dexterous fingers in pastry or in butter; and in the empty house, in her old studio, amid remnants of Bobus’s museum, she set to work on a design that had long been in her mind asking her to bring it into being.

Thus the tete-a-tete was so successful that people’s pity was highly diverting, and the vacation was almost too brief, though when the young men began to return, it was a wonder how existence could have been so agreeable without them.

Jock was first, having come home ten days sooner than his friends were willing to part with him, determined if he found his ladies looking pale to drag them out of town, if only to Ramsgate.

They met him in a glow of animation, and Babie hardly gave him time to lay down his basket of ferns from the dale, and flowers from the garden, before she threw open the folding doors to the back drawing-room.

“Why, mother, who sent you that group?  Why do you laugh?  Did Grinstead lend it to Babie to copy?  Young Astyanax, isn’t it?  And, I say!  Andromache is just like Jessie.  I say!  Mother Carey didn’t do it.  Well!  She is an astonishing little mother and no mistake.  The moulding of it!  Our anatomical professor might lecture on Hector’s arm.”

“Ah!  I, haven’t been a surgeon’s wife for nothing.  Your father put me through a course of arms and legs.”

“And we borrowed a baby,” said Babie.  “Mrs. Jones, our old groom’s wife, who lives in the Mews, was only too happy to bring it, and when it was shy, it clung beautifully.”

“Then the helmet.”

“That was out of the British Museum.”

“Has Grinstead seen it?”

“No, I kept it for my own public first.”

“What will you do with it?  Put it into the Royal Academy?”

“No, it is not big enough.  I thought of offering it to the Works that used to take my things in the old Folly days.  They might do it in terra cotta, or Parian.”

“Too good for a toy material like that,” said Jock.  “Get some good opinion before you part with it, mother.  I wish we could keep it.  I’m proud of my Mother Carey.”