Further, he told his visitors that they would
hear from him soon, and altogether they came home so much gratified
that the mother began to lose her sense of being forestalled. She
was hard at work in her own way on a set of models for dinner-table
ornaments which had been ordered. "Pot-boilers" had unfortunately
much more success than the imaginary groups she enjoyed.
Therefore she stayed at home and only sent her young people on a
commission to bring her as many varieties of foliage and seed-vessels
as they could, when Jock and Armine spent this first holiday of
waiting in setting forth with Babie to get a regular good country
walk, grumbling horribly that she would not accompany them.
She was deep in the moulding of a branch of chestnut, which carried
her back to the first time she saw those prickly clusters, on that
day of opening Paradise at Richmond, with Joe by her side, then still
Mr. Brownlow to her, Joe, who had seemed so much closer to her side
in these last few days. The Colonel might call Armine the most like
Joe, and say that Jock almost absurdly recalled her own soldier-
father, Captain Allen, but to her, Jock always the most brought back
her husband's words and ways, in a hundred little gestures and
predilections, and she had still to struggle with her sense of injury
that he should not be the foremost.
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