One afternoon, shortly after we had gotten settled in Appleboro, I came home to find my mother entertaining no less a personage than Mrs. Eustis; she wasn't calling on the Catholic priest and his mother, you understand; far from it! She was recognizing Armand De Rancé and Adele de Marsignan! Mrs. Eustis was a fair, plump little partridge of a woman, so perfectly satisfied with herself that brains, in her case, would have amounted to a positive calamity. She is an instance of the fascination a fool seems to have for men of undoubted powers of mind and heart, for Eustis, who had both to an unusual degree, loved her devotedly, even while he smiled at her. She had, after some years of childlessness, laid him under an everlasting obligation by presenting him with a daughter, an obligation deepened by the fact that the child was in every sense her father's child, not her mother's. That afternoon she brought the little girl with her, to make our acquaintance. When the child, shyly friendly, looked up, it seemed to me for an anguished moment as if another little girl had walked out of the past, so astonishingly like was she to that little lost playmate of my youth. Right then and there Mary Virginia walked into my heart and took possession, as of a place swept and garnished and long waiting her coming. When we knew her better my mother used to say that if she could have chosen a little girl instead of the little boy that had been I, she must have chosen Mary Virginia Eustis out of all the world. Like Judge Mayne's Laurence, she chose to make the Parish House her second home--for indeed my mother ever seemed to draw children to her, as by some delightful magic. Here, then, the child learned to sew and to embroider, to acquire beautiful housewifely accomplishments, and to speak French with flawless perfection; she reaped the benefit of my mother's girlhood spent in a convent in France; and Mrs. Eustis was far too shrewd not to appreciate the value of this. And so we acquired Mary Virginia. I watched the lovely miracle of her growth with an almost painful tenderness. Had I not become a priest, had I realized those spring hopes of mine; and had there been little children resembling their mother, then my own little girls had been like this one. Even thus had been their blue eyes, and theirs, too, such hair of such curling blackness. The hours I spent with the little girl and Laurence helped me as well as them; these fresh souls and growing minds freshened and revived mine, and kept me young in heart. "We are all made of dust," said my mother once. "But Mary Virginia's is star dust. Star dust, and dew, and morning gold," she added musingly.