There were flowers, too, upon the table.  I remember they were all white,—­lilies of the valley, I think; and the vase of Parian marble, itself a solitary lily, unfolding stainless leaves.  Over the mantle she had hung the finest picture in the house,—­an “Ecce Homo,” and an exquisite engraving.  It used to hang in grandmother’s room in the old house.  We children wondered a little that she took it upstairs.

“I want your aunt to feel at home, and see some things,” she said.  “I wish I could think of something more to make it pleasant in here.”

Just as we left the room she turned and looked into it.  “Pleasant, isn’t it?  I am so glad, Sarah,” her eyes dimming a little.  “She’s a very dear sister to me.”

She stepped in again to raise a stem of the lilies that had fallen from the vase and lay like wax upon the table, then she shut the door and came away.

That door was shut just so for years; the lonely bars of sunlight flecked the solitude of the room, and the lilies faded on the table.  We children passed it with hushed footfall, and shrank from it at twilight, as from a room that held the dead.  But into it we never went.

Mother was tired out that afternoon; for she had been on her feet all day, busied in her loving cares to make our simple home as pleasant and as welcome as home could be.  But yet she stopped to dress us in our Sunday clothes,—­and it was no sinecure to dress three persistently undressable children; Winthrop was a host in himself.  “Auntie must see us look our prettiest,” she said.

She was a sight for an artist when she came down.  She had taken off her widow’s cap and coiled her heavy hair low in her neck, and she always looked like a queen in that lustreless black silk.  I do not know why these little things should have made such an impression on me then.  They are priceless to me now.  I remember how she looked, framed there in the doorway, while we were watching for the coach,—­the late light ebbing in golden tides over the grass at her feet, and touching her face now and then through the branches of trees, her head bent a little, with eager, parted lips, and the girlish color on her cheeks, her hand shading her eyes as they strained for a sight of the lumbering coach.  She must have been a magnificent woman when she was young,—­not unlike, I have heard it said, to that far-off ancestress whose name she bore, and whose sorrowful story has made her sorrowful beauty immortal.  Somewhere abroad there is a reclining statue of Queen Mary, to which, when my mother stood beside it, her resemblance was so strong that the by-standers clustered about her, whispering curiously.  “Ah, mon Dieu!” said a little Frenchman aloud, “c’est une resurrection.”

We must have tried her that afternoon, Clara and Winthrop and I; for the spirit of her own excitement had made us completely wild.  Winthrop’s scream of delight, when, stationed on the gate-post, he caught the first sight of the old yellow coach, might have been heard a quarter of a mile.