Here are Gustave
Lenoble and his young wife Diana, with two tall slender damsels by their
side; and here is Valentine Hawkehurst, the successful young scribbler,
with his fair young wife Charlotte; and out on the terrace yonder are two
nurses walking with two babies, at that early, and, to some minds,
obnoxious stage of babyhood in which a perpetual rocking, and pacing to
and fro, and swaying backwards and forwards in the air, is necessary for
the preservation of anything approaching tranquillity. But to the minds
of the two young mothers and the two proud fathers, these small creatures
in their long white robes seem something too bright for earth. The united
ages of the babies do not amount to six months; but the mothers have
counted every gradual stage of these young lives, and to both it seems as
if there had been no time in which the children were not, with so firm a
hold have they possessed themselves of every thought in the foolish
maternal mind, of every impulse in the weak maternal heart.
Mrs. Hawkehurst has brought her son to see his aunt Diana; for Diana has
insisted upon assuming that relationship by letters-patent, as it were.
Madame Lenoble's baby is a daughter, and this fact in itself seems to the
two friends to be a special interposition of Providence.
"Would it not be delightful if they should grow up to love each other and
marry?" exclaimed Diana; and Charlotte agreed with her that such an event
in the future did indeed seem in a manner foreshadowed by the conduct of
the infants in the present.
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