“I told Susan to send her down as soon as she had done her breakfast.  Hark!  I hear her.”  And the Sun, drawing his finger across the mother’s lips, helped them to so bright a smile, that her husband said,—­

“I am afraid we have more than our share of Sunshine, or at least that I have, little wife.”

The bright smile grew so bright as the lady bent a little toward her husband, that the Sun whispered,—­

“There’s no need of sun here, I plainly see,” but, for all that, crept farther into the room; while the door opened, and in skipped a little girl, who might have been taken for the beautiful lady at the head of the table suddenly diminished to childish proportions, and dressed in childish costume, but with all her beauty intensified by the condensation:  for the blue eyes were as large and clear, and even deeper in their tint; the clustering hair was of a brighter gold; and the fair skin pearlier in its whiteness, and richer in its rosiness; while the gay exuberance of life, glowing and sparkling from every curve and dimple of the child’s face and figure, was, even in the happy mother’s face, somewhat dimmed by the shadows that still must fall upon every life past its morning, be it never so happy, or never so prosperous.

“Morning, mamma and papa.  It’s my birthday; and I’m six years old,—­six, six years old!  One, two, three, four, five, six years old!  Susan told them all to me, and Susan said she guessed papa didn’t forgotten it.  She didn’t forgotten it; and see!”

The child held up a gay horn of sugar-plums fluttering with ribbons, and then, hugging it to her breast with one hand, plunged the other in, and offered a little fistful of the comfits, first to her father, and then to her mother.  Both smilingly declined the treat, explaining that they had but just done breakfast:  and the young lady, dropping some back into the horn, thrust the rest into her own mouth, saying, “So has I; but I like candy all the day.”

“Come here, you little Sunshine,” said Mr. Legrange, drawing her toward him.  “So Susie thought I hadn’t forgotten your birthday, eh?  Well, do you know what they always do to people on their birthdays?”

“Give ’em presents,” replied the child promptly, as she desperately swallowed the mouthful of candy.

“Ho, ho! that’s it is it?  No; but, besides that, they always pull their ears as many times as they are years old.  Now, then, don’t you wish I had forgotten it?”

Sunshine’s eyes grew a little larger, and travelled swiftly toward her mother’s face, coming back to her father’s with a smile.

“I don’t believe you’d hurt me much, papa,” said she, nestling close to his side.

The father folded her tightly in his arms, lifting her to a seat upon his knee.

“I don’t believe I would, little Sunshine.  Well, then, sometimes, instead of pinches, they give little girls as many kisses as they are years old.  How will that do?”