"Bobby boy!" he announced. "P'ay sogers!"
Winks considered a second longer. Then he, too, removed his thumb.
"Mh-mh," he assented, and allowed Bobby to take him by the hand. They trotted off like brothers born, to play with the tin soldiers that Rosa had already unpacked.
"Che amorini!" sighed she, looking after them with clasped hands. She did not ask more of life than two such bambini to adore. Rosa's was the true mother-heart. Whether born of her own flesh or of another's, children were all in all to her.
Though Sophy felt so dusty from her journey, she would not take the time for a tub, from these first, wondrous hours of homecoming. She longed to be out in the old grounds. Charlotte left her at last, to "see about supper." How the familiar phrase warmed Sophy's heart! She peeped again into the nursery before going down. She had worried a little as to how Rosa would "get on" with the darkies. She need not have done so. She found the dear old negress and the Lombard peasant woman sitting side by side. Rosa looked up as she entered, and patted Mammy Nan's rather embarrassed, satiny-brown face.
"Ees goo-ood," she cooed. "La Mora e molto buona ... molto simpatica."
To hear Mammy Nan called "the Moor" made Sophy smile. She stood there smiling at them.
"Rosa's a mighty nice woman, Mammy," she said, slipping easily into the vernacular.
"She sho' do 'pear so," agreed Mammy Nan, amiable but nervous. It seemed so very peculiar to her to have a strange "white 'ooman" patting her cheek and calling her "Cara," when her name was Ann.