"THE PRETTY LADY."
"Mother, mother, mother!"
"And look!—oh, do look at what I have got!" were the words that greeted Mrs. Home, when, very tired, after a day of hard nursing with one of her husband's sick parishioners, she came back.
The children ought to have been in bed, the baby fast asleep, the little parlor-table tidily laid for tea: instead of which, the baby wailed unceasingly up in the distant nursery, and Harold and Daisy, having nearly finished Charlotte's sweeties, and made themselves very uncomfortable by repeated attacks on the rich plum-cake, were now, with very flushed cheeks, alternately playing with their toys and poking their small fingers into the still unopened brown-paper parcels. They had positively refused to go up to the nursery, and, though the gas was lit and the blinds were pulled down, the spirit of disorder had most manifestly got into the little parlor.
"Oh, mother!—what do you think? The lovely lady!—the lady we met in the park yesterday!—she has been, and she brought us lots of things—toys, and sweeties, and cakes, and—oh, mother, do look!"
Daisy presented her doll, and Harold blew some very shrill blasts from his trumpet right up into his mother's eyes.
"My dear children," said Mrs. Home, "whom do you mean? where did you get all these things? who has come here? Why aren't you both in bed? It is long past your usual hour."
This string of questions met with an unintelligible chorus of replies, in which the words "pretty lady," "Regent's Park," "father knew her," "we had to sit up," so completely puzzled Mrs. Home, that had not her eyes suddenly rested on the little note waiting for her on the mantelpiece she would have been afraid her children had taken leave of their senses.
"Oh, yes; she told us to give you that," said Harold when he saw his mother take it up.
I have said the note was very short. Charlotte Home read it in a moment.