hat night! I would have
clung to a dog that had been kind to me. I thought of the first day
Doctor Manning had brought him to me, in this same comical little
jacket, by the way, and the strangely tender tone in which he had
said,--"This is your mother, boy. He's as rough as a bear, Hetty, but he
won't give you trouble or pain. Nothing shall give you pain, if
I"----Then he stopped. I never heard that man make a promise. If he had
come out instead of Teddy on the porch that night, and had spoken once
in the old tone, calling me "Hetty," God knows how different all that
came after would have been. The motherless boy, holding himself up by my
knees, was more sturdy than I that night, and self-reliant: never could
have known, in his most helpless baby-days, the need with which I, an
adult woman, craved a cheering word, and a little petting.

Jacqueline came behind me and pinned a woollen shawl around my neck,
patting my shoulders in her cozy, comfortable fashion.

"None of your dark river-fogs at Newport," she laughed. "The sea-air has
the sweep of half the world to gather cold and freshness in, and it
makes even your bones alive. Your very sleep is twice as much sleep
there as anywhere else."

Jacky's rough voice was like the cuckoo's: it always prophesied pleasant
weather. She went in again now, and sat down on her little sewing-chair.
The low, rolling fogs outside, and the sharp September wind rattling the
bare branches of the orchard-trees and the bushes on the lawn, only made
the solid home-look of comfort within warmer and brighter. There was a
wood-fire kindled on the library-hearth, and its glow picked out red
flushes of light on the heavy brown curtains, and the white bust of
Psyche, and a chubby plaster angel looking down. Jacky, rocking and
sewing, her red mouth pursed up, half whistling, suited the picture,
somehow, I could not but feel, mere lump and matter though she might be.
There was something fresh and spicy about her. I never had been
impressed so justly by her as on that night. Rough, perhaps, but it was
a pure roughness: everything about the girl had been clean since she was
born, you felt, from the paint of the house where she lived to the
prayer her nurse had taught her. Her skin was white and ruddy, her blue
eyes clear and full of honesty, her brown curls crisp and unoiled. She
could not reason, maybe; but she was straightforward and comfortable:
every bone in her roly-poly little figure forgot to b