Home for the holidays! What a joyous sound the words have for little ears! Holidays—home! Two iridiscent words of rainbow-promise, expectation in all its warm witchery of dream and enchantment, of indolence and eager activity, of impulses unrestrained, and of constant caresses. For me, alas! how much less they meant than for happier children; but even to me the change was delightful, and I welcomed the hopes it contained with all the lively emotions of imaginative childhood. First there was the excitement of the voyage, then the fresh acquaintance with the land I had left two years ago, my own quaint and melancholy land I was about to behold again through foreign glasses; then the captivation of my importance in the family circle, the wonderful things to tell, the revelations, the surprises, embroidered fact so close upon the hidden heels of invention!

My mother came to take me home. She[Pg 183] stayed at the Ivies. It was summer-time, and all the rose-bushes were blood-red with blossom, and one breathed the fragrance of roses as if one were living a Persian poem. Not a white rose anywhere, but red upon red, through every tone from crimson to pink. Is it an exaggeration of imagination, or were the Lysterby lanes and gardens rivers of red, like the torrent-beds of the Greek isles when the oleander is a-bloom? For, looking back to the summers of Lysterby, I see nothing on earth but roses, multiplied like the daisies of the field, a whole county waving perfumed red in memory of the great historic house whose emblem in a memorable war was the red rose of Lysterby.

Of my mother\'s stay at the Ivies, though she stayed there several days, I remember little definite but two characteristic scenes. Walking across the lawn toward where she stood in the sunshine talking to Sister Esmeralda, I see her still as vividly now as then. She made so superb a picture that even I, who saw her through a hostile and embittered glance, stopped and asked myself if that imperial creature really were my mother. The word mother is so close, so familiar, so everyday an image, and this magnificent woman looked as remote as a queen of legend.[Pg 184] Her very beauty was of a nature to inspire terror, as if the mere dropping of her white gold-fringed lids meant the sentence of death to the beholder. My companions round about me were prone in abject admiration, and of their state I took note with some measure of pride.

Not so had Polly Evans\'s mother been regarded; not so was even Lady Wilhelmina, the Catholic peeress who came to benediction on Sunday, regarded, though she had the haughty upper lip and inscrutable gaze of sensational fiction.

How to paint her, as she stood thus valorously free to the raking sunbeams that showed out the mild white bloom and roseleaf pink of her long, full visage? She wore on her abundant fair hair a black lace bonnet, trimmed with mauve flowers and a white aigrette, and the long train of her white alpaca gown lay upon the grass like a queen\'s robe. I remember my admiration of the thousand little............