"Well, there is rather a hurry, Nannie," I said. "I am so anxious to see if you like all the house."
At last I got her upstairs. I threw open the nursery door. It was too sudden, no doubt. At the sight of the kettle, the rocking-horse, the tea-set, she burst into tears.
"Dear, dear Nannie," I said, "it is your own nursery; it's all from Hames."
She paused in her sobs. "The robin mug's wrong," she said, and she moved it to the opposite side of the table; "he always sat there." "He" applied to a little brother who had died, not to the mug.
"It's a very small nursery, Nannie," I said apologetically.
"Well, there are no children to make it untidy," she answered.
So Nannie and I settled down in our nursery, and through the darkening of that first evening she talked to me of my mother. It seems to me very wonderful how one woman can so devotedly love the children of another, but was it not greatly for the love of that other woman that Nannie loved us so much? It is her figure, I know, that Nannie sees when she shuts her eyes and re-peoples the nursery in her dreams,—that lovely mother, the center of that nursery and home; that mother so quick to praise, so loath to blame, so ready to find good in everything, so tender to suffering, so pitiful to sin!
"Tell me about her when she was quite young, Nannie," I said.
And Nannie talked on, telling me the stories I knew by heart and loved so dearly; and then, I remember, she started up.
"What is it, Nannie?" I asked.