“I don’t say that you are not very foolish to undertake the girl,” she wrote. “Mary Browne is nothing to you, nor you to her. She may be very agreeable. Jack seems half insane about her—” Jack had been to see Aunt Briscoe, and no doubt he had enlarged on Maimie’s charms in his artless fashion;—“but I do not see what that has to do with the matter. However, I enclose a gift of five pounds towards your extra expenses just now. Of course you will not expect it to be repeated.”
No, that we certainly did not. But how thankful we were, and how I wondered over my own want of trust, my “little faith.”
Five pounds did not make things easy for us; and four times five pounds would not have done so either. But the gift came just in time to tide us over a serious difficulty. Help that is sent does so often come just in time,—not more, but also not less, than “just in time.”
So weeks went by, and at last the day came when Maimie might walk downstairs. Then in a little while she slipped quietly out of her invalidism, and joined our family life again; only we had to be very careful lest she should do too much.
I saw a great change in Maimie. I don’t know whether others did. Not only in her having grown thin and colourless, and having lost much of the flaxen hair. Her smile was as sweet as ever, sweeter than ever, I think; but she seemed more silent and gentle, and often more grave.
It was singular how she clung to me. Her love for Robert and Cherry was not lessened; but I think her love for me was greatest. When tired, she used to sit on the ground beside me, with her head on my knee. If I advised the sofa, she would say, “Please let me be here. I like this so much. It feels as if I had mother again.”
Maimie was very anxious to resume her share of work and mending; but at present Cherry and I set our faces against her doing so. She was still weak and easily worn out; and the change of air which might have set her up lay quite out of our reach.
“Aunt Marion,” she said thoughtfully one day, “I do think it so strange that my father never writes.”
“He may be ill,” I said to her, as she had once said to me.
“Would he be ill so long as this?”