Mary and Emmeline Fitzgerald were both cheerful girls.

I do not mean that they were boisterous laughers, that in waltzing they would tear round a room like human steam-engines, that they rode well to hounds as some young ladies now-a-days do--and some young ladies do ride very well to hounds; nor that they affected slang, and decked their persons with odds and ends of masculine costume.

In saying that they were cheerful, I by no means wish it to be understood that they were loud.
They were pretty, too, but neither of them lovely, as their mother had been--hardly, indeed, so lovely as that pale mother was now, even in these latter days.

Ah, how very lovely that pale mother was, as she sat still and silent in her own place on the small sofa by the slight, small table which she used! Her hair was gray, and her eyes sunken, and her lips thin and bloodless; but yet never shall I see her equal for pure feminine beauty, for form and outline, for passionless grace, and sweet, gentle, womanly softness.

All her sad tale was written upon her brow; all its sadness and all its poetry.
One could read there the fearful, all but fatal danger to which her childhood had been exposed, and the daily thanks with which she praised her God for having spared and saved her.
But I am running back to the mother in attempting to say a word about her children.