"The gentlemen are coming," the nurse almost
whispered; and then she withdrew, and shutting the glass-doors behind
her, left this mother to meet with these sons.
Whatever anxiety, whatever sensations of maternal affection might have
been stirring within her, it is certain that her first feeling was one
of intense surprise. The well-remembered faces that she had cherished
now for much more than half a century--the tall, beautiful youth--the
fine boy, almost a child, that had gone off with him, could they be now
before her? She was not at all oblivious of the flight of time; she did
not forget that the eldest of these sons was scarcely nineteen years
younger than herself; yet she had made no defined picture of their
present faces in her mind, and it was not without a troubled sense of
wonder that she rose and saw coming on towards her two majestic old men,
with hair as white as snow.
Her first words were simple and hesitating. She immediately knew them
from one another.
"Son Dan'el," she said, turning to the taller, "I expect this is you;"
and she shifted her staff to her left hand while he took the right; and
then the other old man, coming up, stooped, and kissed her on the
forehead.
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