No one answered, but six eager eyes watched, and three throbbing hearts waited, as the horses came with slow steps, and the carriage rolled carefully along. The top had been raised, and curious gazers along the way could see nothing; neither could the girls, when at last the gate was reached, but though they went out, something restrained their eager joyous welcome, and they said nothing. Olive got out first, then Mrs. Dering, and Dr. Barnett, and then came a strange gentleman, bearing a perfectly helpless and evidently unconscious figure, with its face covered; and the girls shrank back to let them pass, then surrounded Olive with eager, trembling questions. "She has fainted," Olive said. "She kept growing more excited after we left New York, and I thought she would faint when we came in sight of Canfield, but she didn't until the train stopped; and then the moment she saw mama, she tried to speak, and fainted right away." There was no time to ask, or answer further questions, as they hurried into the house and up stairs, where Ernestine had been carried, and laid upon the soft, snowy bed; but after one glance at her unconscious face, they drew back and burst into tears. Olive was talking to the strange gentleman, for whose name no one had thought to inquire, and Dr. Barnett and Mrs. Dering hung over the bed, winning life back to the fragile figure thereon. They all saw the first opening of her eyes, that went straight to one dear face, saw the feeble arms lifted with a strength, born of joy, and heard the sobbing cry: "Mama, mama! darling mama!" and everybody cried. After awhile the girls went in and kissed her quietly, then the room was ordered to be cleared, and under the influence of an opiate, Ernestine sank to sleep, with her hands clasping those of the dear woman who was, and would be always, "mama." When they went down stairs, Olive presented them to Cousin Roger, and told in few words of all his kindness; and Kat, the vivacious, who hated and longed to see him removed from the face of the earth, was seen to drop two big tears on his hand that she was shaking heartily. To Beatrice came the same vague, uncertain feeling that Olive had experienced when first seeing him, and he caught the same bewildered look in her eyes. Had she ever seen him before? If not, what was it in his face that reminded her of--something? Mrs. Dering did not leave Ernestine's side again that day. Olive came up with her, and they held a long conversation in low voices; and a look of perfect content was seen to drift into the mother's pale, anxious face, as she listened how Jean was growing well, and then looked down at the quiet sleeper--the one who had been snatched from the burning, and given back into her arms. "Just think, if I had not gone to Virginia?" Olive said that evening, while they were all in the kitchen, doing up the supper work. "It really makes me tremble to think how I did not want to go, and hesitated about it."