"One little girl can't move much furniture about;" with a sound of humor in his voice.
"Oh, you know what I mean—not actually dragging sofas and tables about, but she will chairs, as you'll see. And lots of other things. Look at the Rendall children. The house always looks as if it had been stirred up with the pudding-stick, and Sally Rendall spends good half her time looking for things they have carted off. Tom and Anstice were digging up the path the day we called, and what do you suppose they had! The tablespoons. And I'll venture to say they were left out of doors."
"There are so many of them," Chilian said, as if in apology.
"And I don't see how we can keep this child away from them. It isn't as if they were low-down people. Sally's father having been a major in the war, and the Rendalls are good stock. Let me see—what's her name? Her mother was called Letty."
"Cynthia. She was named for my mother." Chilian's voice had a reverent softness in it.
"I always thought it a pretty name," said Eunice.
"And I've heard people call it 'Cyn.' I do abominate nicknames."
Elizabeth uttered this with a good deal of vigor. Then she remembered she quite liked Bessy.
No one spoke for some moments. Chilian thought of the sister, whose brief married life had ended in her pretty home at Providence, and how she looked in her coffin with her baby sheltered by one arm. The picture came before him vividly.
Elizabeth liked cleanliness and order. It was natural after a long practice in it. Chilian's particular ways suited her. Year after year had settled them—perhaps she had settled him more definitely, as he liked the way. Eunice was thinking of the little girl who had neither father or mother. She had some unfulfilled dreams. In her youth there had been a lover, and a wedding planned when he came home from his voyage. She had begun to "lay by" for housekeeping. And there were some pretty garments in the trunk upstairs, packed away with other articles. The lover was lost at sea, as befell many another New England coast woman.