h had left her
to look for the cards, "what nonsense are you writing on our darling's
slate that puts her all in a flutter, and makes her blush up to the
eyes, when she's only looking at her poor old Peck? Bless her heart!
she's just as easily amused now as when she was a child. Give us another
kiss, my own little love. You understand what I mean, don't you, though
you can't hear me? Ah, dear, dear! when she stands and looks at me with
her eyes like that, she's the living image of--"

"Cribbage," cried Mr. Blyth, knocking a triangular board for three
players on the table, and regarding Mrs. Peckover with the most
reproachful expression that his features could assume.

She felt that the look had been deserved, and approached the card-table
rather confusedly, without uttering another word. But for Valentine's
second interruption she would have declared, before young Thorpe, that
"little Mary" was the living image of her mother.

"Madonna's going to play, as usual. Will you make the third, Lavvie?"
inquired Valentine, shuffling the cards. "It's no use asking Zack; he
can't even count yet."

"No, thank you, dear. I shall have quite enough to do in going on with
my book, and trying to keep master Mad-Cap in order while you play,"
replied Mrs. Blyth.

The game began. It was a regular custom, whenever Mrs. Peckover came
to Mr. Blyth's house, that cribbage should be played, and that Madonna
should take a share in it. This was done, on her part, principally in
affectionate remembrance of the old times when she lived under the care
of the clown's wife, and when she had learnt cribbage from Mr. Peckover
to amuse her, while the frightful accident which had befallen her in
the circus was still a recent event. It was characteristic of the
happy peculiarity of her disposition that the days of suffering and
affliction, and the after-period of hard tasks in public, with
which cards were connected in her case, never seemed to recur to her
remembrance painfully when she saw them in later life. The pleasanter
associations which belonged to them, and which reminded her of homely
kindness that had soothed her in pain, and self-denying affection that
had consoled her in sorrow, were the associations instinctively dwelt on
by her heart to the exclusion of all others.

To Mrs. Blyth's great astonishment, Zack, for full ten minutes, required
no keeping in order whatever while the rest were playing at cards. It
was the most marvelous of hu