“My word!” said their mother, looking from one to the other as she sipped her tea. “Am I really your mother, my three tall princesses?”
Anne stood gloating over her lady, whose absence she had ceaselessly mourned. Mrs. Garden’s children had recovered enough by this time to see that she was exceedingly slender, with a willowy grace of motion that gave her five feet two of height the effect of more inches. Her face was long and thin, delicately formed. Jane was more like her than either of the others, though in expression, as in colouring, they were unlike. Mrs. Garden’s hair was a light brown, her eyes were blue, her nose as pretty as possible, straight and fine. Her mouth was small and pretty in shape as in expression. Though she never could have been as lovely as Mary, for she lacked Mary’s earnest eyes and the reposeful strength which supplemented her prettiness; though Jane and Florimel both far outshone her in beauty, yet Mrs. Garden must have been at their age a remarkably pretty girl, with a childish appeal, and a little manner that demanded and inspired service from all of her world. To her children she looked older than they had expected to see her, for to the years below twenty the lines which nearly forty years must engrave suggest age. But in reality she was wonderfully young looking for her age, with a faded look of childhood upon her, as if she were a little girl that some one had veiled unsuitably, and who was overtired. It was easy to understand that she had attracted people to her all her life. The girls, watching her, began to feel her charm, and to throb with rapid heartbeats, feeling it.
“Now I really must go to my room, children,” she announced, rising at last. “I’m quite refreshed; the tea was excellent, my good Abbie. Where is Mr. Moulton? I never said a word to him when I got here! How rude of me! Yet how can one remember one’s manners, meeting her three big girls, whom she last saw babies?”
“Mr. Moulton found Mark coming after him, and went home with him,” Anne explained. “He bade me tell you, Mrs. Garden, that he begged to be excused from wearying you further to-night; that he hoped you would find yourself rested to-morrow, and that he and Mrs. Moulton would come to ask after you in the afternoon.”
“That’s very nice of him, Anne; he seems to be nicer than I remembered him. He bored me when I was a girl here, but the doctor adored him. Are you going to take your mother up, my trio?” asked Mrs. Garden.
Mary, Jane, and Florimel eagerly crowded around her to escort her upstairs. Mary, remembering that Anne loved her no less, and knew her far better, than her own children, turned back and invited Anne to come, too, with her outstretched hand.
“What a pity I’m not a triangle!” said Mrs. Garden, as her three girls tried to find a place next to her simultaneously. “And my room! Quite unchanged! That’s never the same paper, Anne? Yet I’m sure it is! How extraordinary!”
“We tried to match it, mother; Anne had kept a piece of the old paper,” Jane explained. “Do you think you will like it?”
“I think I shall like you!” cried Mrs. Garden, taking the face of each of her girls in turn between her cool palms and kissing their foreheads.
Jane dashed away and, when Mary and Florimel followed her more slowly, they found her tempestuously crying for joy among the pillows on her bed, her small feet waving emotionally. She sat up when her sisters entered.