The young nurse departed, to return with a mischievous little lad of four years, beautiful in his night robes of linen and lace, and the mother-love, which even the society life could not destroy, shone in Mrs. Wylie’s eyes as she clasped him in her arms. “You may leave us now, Tibby. I will call you when Robbie has done with his play.” The smiling, dimple-cheeked maid withdrew, and the mother gave herself up to the enjoyment of a frolic with the wide-awake child. When, an hour later, she summoned the maid to put the cherub in his bed, she met with opposition. Robbie had not wearied of his mother, and refused to go. “But it is bed-time, Robbie, and the sand-man will come to put sand in your eyes,” remonstrated Mrs. Wylie. “Don’t tare, ain’t doin’ to bed,” asserted the wilful child. “But you must go, dear; mother desires it.” “Ain’t doin’ to,” persisted Robbie, with the perversity of a spoiled child. The mother looked helplessly at Tibby, who came forward smiling, while her eyes sought those of the little rebel. “Come,” she said sweetly, and to Mrs. Wylie’s surprise the boy put his hand into the inviting one of the nurse and suffered himself to be led from the room. “What remarkable eyes that girl has,” soliloquized Mrs. Wylie as the door closed behind them. “I have been more fortunate than I dared hope in securing her services.” CHAPTER II TIBBY’S EYES As for Tibby’s eyes, no one had been able to decide upon the exact color of them. On warm, sunshiny afternoons, when Tibby yawned in a swinging hammock on the back veranda and the pupils were small and contracted, they appeared of a cerulean hue, warm and languorous. On cloudy days, when the sky was dark and lowering, Tibby’s eyes were gray and forbidding. But when a tempest of rage shook her pliant figure her eyes sparkled black as coal from the mines. Her brothers called them cat’s eyes, not only because the name Tibby was a contraction of the more severe Tabitha of her christening, but from the ever-varying, changing light which shone in their restless depths, which now dilated until the least rim of color was visible, now contracted like those of a purring kitten. Tibby had not to depend upon the beauty of her opalescent eyes for recognition, for nature had dealt most generously with her, giving her regular features, and so mixing and intermingling the types of brunette and blonde in her physique that no one could determine in which class to catalogue her. The delicious glint of the sun in her brown hair, the rich waves of carmine that tinged and receded from her cheeks, the arched black brows which defined themselves so conspicuously against the shining whiteness of her forehead were contradictions when compared, but formed a _tout ensemble_ most charming.