“It is odd,” Mrs. Yorke remarked, “that of my daughters, Hester, the softest, should be quite strict with her children, while Clara, whom I should have thought would need a warning not to be so, is almost too indulgent.”
“I could have told you that,” Captain Cary answered, glancing across the room to where his wife talked with her father. “Clara’s heart melts only too readily, I always knew. I never mistook her disposition. And, if she is literary, she can darn stockings the most neatly, and make a room look prettier, and get up the best little supper of any woman I know.”
Charlie Cary, loitering toward the door, had scarcely reached it, when it was pushed open, and—was it a human child, or a fairy, who entered, and flitted across the room into Edith Yorke’s arms? A little girl of five years, softly white and dainty, golden-haired and hazel-eyed, and so exquisite in shape that one examined her with delight. Her motions were full of a captivating grace, her voice silvery-fine. She was vowed to the Virgin, and wore only white and blue.
Charlie stopped inside the door to stare at her. He always did follow her about, and watch her, as though she were some strange, rare bird. He seldom volunteered to speak to her, and touched her with timid care, like something he feared to break.
Carl Yorke crossed the room, and leaned on the back of his wife’s chair. One could not see a more perfect group.
Edith bent over the child, her braids of shadowed gold touching the pure gold ringlets. “What does mamma’s little girl want?” she asked.
The child, smilingly aware that all eyes were upon her, but too much accustomed to love to be abashed by their gaze, lisped out her question: “Isn’t Philip, and Charlie, and all of ’em got guardian-angels?”
“Yes, my love!” answered Edith.
“There!” cried the child, with a glance of sparkling triumph at Charlie.
She ran to him, and put her white arms around his neck in a hug of congratulation, then, as light as air, whisked herself behind him.