CHAPTER III

It was such a charming home!--my new one; a fine great house, with
pictures, and delicate decorations, and rich furniture, and no gloom
anywhere, but all the wilderness of dainty colors lit up with flooding
sunshine; and the spacious grounds around it, and the great garden--oh,
greensward, and noble trees, and flowers, no end! And I was the same as
a member of the family; and they loved me, and petted me, and did not
give me a new name, but called me by my old one that was dear to me
because my mother had given it me--Aileen Mavourneen. She got it out of
a song; and the Grays knew that song, and said it was a beautiful name.

Mrs. Gray was thirty, and so sweet and so lovely, you cannot imagine it;
and Sadie was ten, and just like her mother, just a darling slender
little copy of her, with auburn tails down her back, and short frocks;
and the baby was a year old, and plump and dimpled, and fond of me, and
never could get enough of hauling on my tail, and hugging me, and
laughing out its innocent happiness; and Mr. Gray was thirty-eight, and
tall and slender and handsome, a little bald in front, alert, quick in
his movements, business-like, prompt, decided, unsentimental, and with
that kind of trim-chiseled face that just seems to glint and sparkle with
frosty intellectuality! He was a renowned scientist. I do not know what
the word means, but my mother would know how to use it and get effects.
She would know how to depress a rat-terrier with it and make a lap-dog
look sorry he came. But that is not the best one; the best one was
Laboratory. My mother could organize a Trust on that one that would skin
the tax-collars off the whole herd. The laboratory was not a book, or a
picture, or a place to wash your hands in, as the college president's dog
said--no, that is the lavatory; the laboratory is quite different, and is