But he was hauling the baggage out of the sledge, and was much too busy to notice how near to breakdown his wife had come.
“Oh, what a lot of children! I mean, what a lot they look altogether,” said Bertha, as she was half-led, half-dragged into a room which seemed to be full of babies.
“Yes, are they not darlings? This is Dicky, my eldest, a very bad boy mostly, at other times very good indeed; then comes Molly, who always reminds me of you when you were a baby. After her there are Jimmy, Sue, and Baby Noll, who will be a year old on Christmas Day. Now, children, just give Auntie Bertha the very nicest welcome that you can manage.”
But the small people were much too shy to make any demonstration of welcome. Dicky and Molly stared at her from solemn eyes, which to Bertha seemed to have a disapproving stare; while the twins, Jimmy and Sue, who were two years old, burst into howls of protest when she wanted to kiss them, and the fat baby swelled the chorus.
Bertha’s heart grew heavy with secret dismay. She had so little first-hand knowledge of children, and she wondered how it would be possible to endure the long months of winter shut into a small house with so many crying babies. Perhaps if she had not been so very tired with her long journey, and the wearing strain of the time when they were snowed-up on the western fork, things would not have seemed quite so dreary or so hopelessly hard to bear.
“Oh, my dear, my dear, you cannot think what joy it is to have you here!” cried Grace again. “I had no idea how much I loved you all until I came away, and you cannot think how much I have longed for a sight of some of the dear home faces. But you have altered so much that I should not have known you, and you look so quiet, though you were such a restless, fidgety child, never content to sit still for more than two minutes at the stretch. Your father used to call you ‘Little Quicksilver’, and that is what you were.”
“I am afraid that I must have outgrown the character, then, with my flapper frocks, for I am not a bit quick at anything now, and the girls would tell you the same,” replied Bertha ruefully.
“Oh, what nonsense! You cannot really expect me to believe that a Doyne could be slow at anything, except in the matter of thinking evil of one’s neighbour,” said Grace, with a laugh. “And you are only a flapper still, for the matter of that. How old are you—seventeen?”
“Almost eighteen, but I feel quite thirty,” Bertha answered, with a serious air.
“Wait until you are thirty, then the chances are that you will feel only about thirteen. Oh, I know what girls are like, especially girls with brains, and you were due to be the genius of the family!” said Mrs. Ellis, as she swept the crying twins up from the floor with one arm, and picked up the baby with the other, upon which ensued a great calm, for even a stranger was tolerable when viewed from the safe vantage-ground of mother’s arms. Little Dick and Molly had retired into private life behind her chair, and so the whole family watched Bertha take off her wraps, very much enjoying the spectacle.