“It’s awfully pretty, daddy!” said Martha.
Renie echoed her sister’s approval; but they didn’t seem impressed.
“They are strange here,” he thought. “After a few days it will be different.”
Their appetites were good, he noticed. Their mother had always looked after their physical welfare most vigilantly. Their table manners were good, too. Well, so were hers, when she bothered to think about such things.
“She’s taken good care of them,” thought Blakie.
He had known that she would. Her love for her children was an unfaltering, inexhaustible passion. She was often injudicious with them. She spoiled them, of course, and sometimes she grew angry at them. Once he had heard her call Martha a darned fool; but Martha had only laughed at her, and then Katherine herself had laughed and hugged the child tight.
“Didn’t mean to be so cross, sweetheart baby!”
“Oh, I know it, mother![Pg 541]”
What sort of way was that to bring up children?
“She’ll be missing them to-night,” he thought.