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92 “My word!” said their mother, looking from one to the other as she sipped her tea. “Am I really your mother, my three tall princesses?”

Anne stood gloating over her lady, whose absence she had ceaselessly mourned. Mrs. Garden’s children had recovered enough by this time to see that she was exceedingly slender, with a willowy grace of motion that gave her five feet two of height the effect of more inches. Her face was long and thin, delicately formed. Jane was more like her than either of the others, though in expression, as in colouring, they were unlike. Mrs. Garden’s hair was a light brown, her eyes were blue, her nose as pretty as possible, straight and fine. Her mouth was small and pretty in shape as in expression. Though she never could have been as lovely as Mary, for she lacked Mary’s earnest eyes and the reposeful strength which supplemented her prettiness; though Jane and Florimel both far outshone her in beauty, yet Mrs. Garden must have been at their age a remarkably pretty girl, with a childish appeal, and a little manner that demanded and inspired service from all of her world. To her children she looked older than they had expected to see her, for to the years below twenty the lines which nearly forty years