"Ay, thank God it is over!" said John, as he put his arm round his wife, and looked in her worn face, where still her own smile lingered—her bright, brave smile, that nothing could ever drive away. "And now we must try and make a little holiday for you."
"Nonsense! I am as well as possible. Did not Dr. Jessop tell me, this morning, I was looking younger than ever? I—a mother of a family, thirty years old? Pray, Uncle Phineas, do I look my age?"
I could not say she did not—especially now. But she wore it so gracefully, so carelessly, that I saw—ay, and truly her husband saw—a sacred beauty about her jaded cheek, more lovely and lovable than all the bloom of her youth. Happy woman! who was not afraid of growing old.
"Love"—John usually called her "Love"—putting it at the beginning of a sentence, as if it had been her natural Christian name—which, as in all infant households, had been gradually dropped or merged into the universal title of "Mother." My name for her was always emphatically "The Mother"—the truest type of motherhood I ever knew.
"Love," her husband began again, after a long look in her face—ah, John, thine was altered too, but himself was the last thing he thought of—"say what you like—I know what we'll do: for the children's sake. Ah, that's her weak point;—see, Phineas, she is yielding now. We'll go for three months to Longfield."
Now Longfield was the Utopia of our family, old and young. A very simple family we must have been—for this Longfield was only a small farm-house, about six miles off, where once we had been to tea, and where ever since we had longed to live. For, pretty as our domain had grown, it was still in the middle of a town, and the children, like all naturally-reared children, craved after the freedom of the country—after corn-fields, hay-fields, nuttings, blackberryings—delights hitherto known only at rare intervals, when their father could spare a whole long day, and be at once the sun and the shield of the happy little band.
"Hearken, children! father says we shall go for three whole months to live at Longfield."
The three boys set up a shout of ecstacy.
"I'll swim boats down the stream, and catch and ride every one of the horses. Hurrah!" shouted Guy.
"And I'll see after the ducks and chickens, and watch all the threshing and winnowing," said Edwin, the practical and grave.