‘How strange boys are,’ she reflects. ‘Have you any “plan,” Amy?’ ‘Only this, dear Ginevra, to leap into my mother’s arms.’ Ginevra lifts what can only be called a trouser leg, because that is what it is, though they are very seldom seen alone. ‘What is this my busy bee is making?’ ‘It’s a gentleman’s leg,’ Amy explains, not without a sweet blush. ‘You hand-sew them and stretch them over a tin cylinder, and they are then used as umbrella stands. _Art in the Home_ says they are all the rage.’ ‘Oh, Amy, _Boudoir Gossip_ says they have quite gone out.’ ‘Again! Every art decoration I try goes out before I have time to finish it.’ She remembers the diary. ‘Did my Ginevra like my new page?’ ‘Dearest, that is what I came down to speak about. You forgot to give me the key.’ ‘Ginevra, can you ever forgive me? Let us go up and read it together.’ With arms locked they seek the seclusion of Amy’s bedroom. Cosmo rushes in to tell them that there is a suspicious-looking cab coming down the street, but finding the room empty he departs again to reconnoitre. A cab draws up, a bell rings, and soon we hear the voice of Colonel Grey. He can talk coherently to Fanny, he can lend a hand in dumping down his luggage in the passage, he can select from a handful of silver wherewith to pay his cabman: all impossible deeds to his Alice, who would drop the luggage on your toes and cast all the silver at your face rather than be kept another minute from her darlings. ‘Where are they?’ she has evidently cried just before we see her, and Fanny has made a heartless response, for it is a dejected Alice that appears in the doorway of the room. ‘_All_ out!’ she echoes wofully, ‘even--even baby?’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’ The poor mother, who had entered the house like a whirlwind, subsides into a chair. Her arms fall empty by her side: a moment ago she had six of them, a pair for each child. She cries a little, and when Alice cries, which is not often for she is more given to laughter, her face screws up like Molly’s rather than like Amy’s. She is very unlike the sketch of her lately made by the united fancies of her son and daughter; and she will dance them round the room many times before they know her better. Amy will never be so pretty as her mother, Cosmo will never be so gay, and it will be years before either of them is as young. But it is quite a minute before we suspect this; we must look the other way while the Colonel dries her tears. He is quite a grizzled veteran, and is trying hard to pretend that having done without his children for so many years, a few minutes more is no great matter. His adorable Alice is this man’s one joke. Some of those furrows in his brow have come from trying to understand her, he owes the agility of his mind to trying to keep up with her; the humorous twist in his mouth is the result of chuckling over her. She flutters across the room. ‘Robert,’ she says, thrilling. ‘I daresay my Amy painted that table.’