roups of children,
gaily exchanging pleasant talk with one friend after another, and most
of all with Rachel, who seemed to gravitate back to her whenever any
summons had for a time interrupted their affluence of conversation.

And all the time Ermine's footstool was serving as a table for the
various flowers that two children were constantly gathering in the grass
and presenting to her, to Rachel, or to each other, with a constant
stream of not very comprehensible prattle, full of pretty gesticulation
that seemed to make up for the want of distinctness. The yellow-haired,
slenderly-made, delicately-featured boy, whose personal pronouns were
just developing, and his consonants very scanty, though the elder of
the two, dutifully and admiringly obeyed the more distinct, though less
connected, utterances of the little dark-eyed girl, eked out by
pretty imperious gestures, that seemed already to enchain the little
white-frocked cavalier to her service. All the time it was droll to see
how the two ladies could pay full attention to the children, while going
on with their own unbroken stream of talk.

"I am not overwhelming you," suddenly exclaimed Rachel, checking herself
in mid-career about the mothers' meetings for the soldiers' wives.

"Far from it. Was I inattentive--?"

"Oh no--(Yes, Una dear, very pretty)--but I found myself talking in the
voice that always makes Alick shut his eyes."--"I should not think
he often had to do so," said Ermine, much amused by this gentle
remedy--("Mind, Keith, that is a nettle. It will sting--")

"Less often than before," said Rachel--("Never mind the butterfly,
Una)--I don't think I have had more than one thorough fit of what he
calls leaping into the gulf. It was about the soldiers' wives married
without leave, who, poor things, are the most miserable creatures in the
world; and when I first found out about them I was in the sort of mood
I was in about the lace, and raved about the system, and was resolved to
employ one poor woman, and Alick looked meeker and meeker, and assented
to all I said, as if he was half asleep, and at last he quietly took up
a sheet of paper, and said he must write and sell out, since I was bent
on my gulf, and an officer's wife must be bound by the regulations
of the service. I was nearly as bad as ever, I could have written an
article on the injustice of the army regulations, indeed I did begin,
but what do you think the end was? I got a letter from a goo