back at first, when, unmindful of Asenath and Eudora, who had not yet been greeted, she tried to take him in her arms. “Oh, Willie, darling, don’t you know me! I am poor mam-ma,” and Adah’s voice was choked with sobs at this unlooked for reception from her child. He had been sent for from Anna’s home to meet his mother, because it was proper; but no one at Terrace Hill had said to him that the mamma for whom Anna taught him daily to pray, was coming. _She_ was not in his mind; and as eighteen months had obliterated all memories of the girlish creature he once knew as mother, he could not immediately identify that mother with the lady before him. It was a sad disappointment to Adah, and without knowing what she was doing, she sank down upon the sofa, and involuntarily laying her head in Mrs. Richards lap, cried bitterly, her tears bringing answering ones from the eyes of all three of the ladies, for they half believed her grief, in part, was for the lifeless form in the room below. “Poor child, you are tired and worn. It is hard to lose him just as there was a prospect of perfect reconciliation with us all,” Mrs. Richards said, softly smoothing the brown tresses lying on her lap, and thinking even then that _curls_ were more becoming to her daughter-in-law than braids had been, but wondering why, now she was in mourning, Adah had persisted in wearing them. “Pretty girl, pretty _turls_, is you _tyin_?” and won by her distress, Willie drew near, and laid his baby hand upon the curls he thought so pretty. “That’s mamma, Willie,” Asenath said; “the mamma Aunt Anna said would come some time—Willie’s mamma. Can’t he kiss her?” The child could not resist the face which, lifting itself up, looked eagerly at him, and he put up his little hands for Adah to take him, returning the kisses she showered upon him, and clinging to her neck, while he said, “Is you mam-ma sure? I prays for mam-ma—God take care of her, and pa-pa too. He’s dead. They brought him back with a _dum_. Poor pa-pa, Willie don’t want him dead;” and the little lip began to quiver. Never since she knew she was a widow had Adah felt so vivid a sensation of something akin to affection for the dead, as when her child mourned so plaintively for papa; and the tears which now fell like rain were not for Willie alone. “Mrs. Richards has not yet greeted us,” Asenath said; and turning to her at once, Adah apologized for her seeming neglect, pressing both her and Eudora’s hands more cordially than she would have done a few moments before. “Where is Anna?” she asked; and Mrs. Richards replied, “She’s sick. She regretted much that she could not come up here to-day;” while Willie, standing in Adah’s lap, with his chubby arm around her neck, chimed in, “You don’t know what we’ve dot. We’ve dot ’ittle baby, we has.”