I want Gabriella to see the children the first thing." As they entered the house Jane's children, a flock of five girls and two boys, fluttered up to be introduced, and among them Gabriella discovered the composed baby of Jane's tragic flight.

It seemed an age ago, and she felt not thirty-eight, but a thousand.
After dinner Charley, who had eaten immoderately, unfolded the evening paper under the electric lamp in the library, and dozed torpidly while the girls plied their aunt with innumerable questions about New York and the spring fashions.

"It will be lovely to have Fanny with us at the White Sulphur.

I know her clothes will be wonderful," they chirped happily, clustering eagerly about the sofa on which Gabriella was sitting.

Jane's children, deriving from some hardy stock of an earlier generation, were handsome, vigorous, optimistic in blood and fibre, and so uncompromisingly modern that Gabriella wondered how Mrs.Carr, with her spiritual neuralgia and her perpetual mourning, had survived the unceasing currents of fresh air with which they surrounded her.
"Yes, things have changed.