But joy was at the full when I invited them to come and see me. The hour fixed was at a distance of a week, and every day I was asked “has it come?” When it did come I was sitting at my window, and seeing the Raj carriage and pair, with all its pomp of liveried attendants, dash up the drive, I smiled to myself, thinking of the semi-nude atoms which would presently issue thence. Little did I know. The atoms, my very own Baby friends of the waist-band and necklet, were translated. At the door, hand in hand and very shy, stood two of the quaintest oddities I have ever seen--_my_ Babies, sure enough, but dressed as English widows, crêpe veil and all, with long false curls of rusty black hair adown their poor little black-gowned backs. Oh! but how I laughed! And they stood by, rueful and disappointed, while I stripped them, even to their natural clothing. “Then the Miss Sahib loved not the English clothes; nor” (with a gasp of wonder) “the hair of another.” “_No! No!_” And two pairs of brows knit themselves in solemn puzzlement over this contrariety. Then, “But the Miss Sahib said she loved the children people of the English.” “Yes! what then?” (but I had guessed). “We want the Miss Sahib to love us.” ... The darlings! Then it was all made clear, helped out by the _Amla_. They had, even as they said, laid their little plot to win love. They would dress like the children-people of the English. But how to compass this! Their Mother undertook to arrange; and a clever _Amla_ went to a second-hand clothes shop near by, which often supplied Theatrical Companies. “No! they had no dress of the English children-people; but stay--an English Mem-Sahib had sold them a dress not long since. They could make two small copies of this.” And the Babies were reproduced in the sad image of some English widow (curls and all), who had evidently fallen on evil days or the brighter days of second marriage, and got rid of her panoply of mourning. I think my Goddess of Learning and “Lightning-Beloved” know by now that these foreign arts are unnecessary in the way of love. I have had no widow repeats, but in my heart I hide the realization of a pathos and charm hitherto unsuspected in the consciousness of Babydom.