"Now I will go to Mamita," said Flora. "Her gentle spirit suffers in these days. This morning, when she saw a company of soldiers marching by, and heard the boys hurrahing, she said to me so piteously, 'O Flora, these are wild times.' Poor Mamita! she's like a dove in a tornado."
"You seemed to be strong as an eagle while you were singing," responded her husband.
"I felt like a drenched humming-bird when Mr. Bright came in," rejoined she; "but he and the music together lifted me up into the blue, as your Germans say."
"And from that height can you say to me, 'Obey the call of duty,
Florimond'?"
She put her little hand in his and answered, "I can. May God protect us all!"
Then, turning to her children, she said: "I am going to bring Mamita; and presently, when I go away to be alone with papa a little while, I want you to do everything to make the evening pleasant for Mamita. You know she likes to hear you sing, 'Now Phoebus sinketh in the west.'"
"And I will play that Nocturne of Mendelssohn's that she likes so much," replied Rosen Blumen. "She says I play it almost as well as Aunt Rosa."
"And she likes to hear me sing, 'Once on a time there was a king,'" said Lila. "She says she heard you singing it in the woods a long time ago, when she hadn't anybody to call her Mamita."
"Very well, my children," replied their mother. "Do everything you can to make Mamita happy; for there will never be such another Mamita."
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