“You never saw the like of them for happiness. When I used to stop at the gate and see them in the grass, perhaps soaking wet, tumbling about and laughing as if they weren’t Christians at all, I said to myself: ‘Oh, dear, dear me, what trouble there must be in store for those beautiful children, that they should be so happy now. God preserve them, if it be his will.’ I whispered: ‘Hush, children, be a bit more secret-like about it.’ It don’t do to boast about anything, let alone happiness. I remember one of them dying sudden. She was little more than a baby; such a child for laughing, as if she was possessed; pretty, too, a regular little moorhen, as you might say, for darkness and prettiness, and fond of the water. I saw one of the maids after the funeral, and took occasion to remark that it was a blessing the child was taken to a better world so soon, before she had known a minute’s sorrow. She fired up--she was outlandish, too, as the maids always were, and talked their tongue, and stood up for them as if they were paid for it--and she says, looking that wicked, ‘Master says he will never forgive it, and I never will. If she had been a peevish child, I don’t say we shouldn’t have been wild because she had missed everything, but to take away a child like that before she could defend herself is a most unchristian act’ ... and that sort of thing. Oh, there was wickedness in them, though they never wronged anybody.” She pointed to the shot marks in a door, and pronounced that no good could come to a family where the children did such things. At each room she made guesses, amounting often to positive asseveration, as to whose it had been. Few enough were the marks of ownership to untutored eyes--chiefly the outlines, like shadows, of furniture and of books that once had leaned against the wall. One door was marked by a series of horizontal lines like those on a thermometer, where children’s height had been registered at irregular intervals, the hand or stick pressing down the curls for truth’s sake.