They were remembered there from year to year; the colored call-boys, who never seemed to get any older, smiled upon them, and the clerk called March by name even before he registered.

He asked if Mrs.March were with him, and said then he supposed they would want their usual quarters; and in a moment they were domesticated in a far interior that seemed to have been waiting for them in a clean, quiet, patient disoccupation ever since they left it two years before.

The little parlor, with its gilt paper and ebonized furniture, was the lightest of the rooms, but it was not very light at noonday without the gas, which the bell-boy now flared up for them.

The uproar of the city came to it in a soothing murmur, and they took possession of its peace and comfort with open celebration.
After all, they agreed, there was no place in the world so delightful as a hotel apartment like that; the boasted charms of home were nothing to it; and then the magic of its being always there, ready for any one, every one, just as if it were for some one alone: it was like the experience of an Arabian Nights hero come true for all the race.
"Oh, why can't we always stay here, just we two!" Mrs.March sighed to her husband, as he came out of his room rubbing his face red with the towel, while she studied a new arrangement of her bonnet and handbag on the mantel.
"And ignore the past?
I'm willing.

I've no doubt that the children could get on perfectly well without us, and could find some lot in the scheme of Providence that would really be just as well for them." "Yes; or could contrive somehow never to have existed.