So in a month she had come to a place in her experience when it was a consolation to think of that sixteen hundred pounds in London. She might yet find it necessary to her happiness; for without some change she could not much longer endure the idleness and monotony of her life. Fortunately the change came. One morning a woman visited the cottage, and the sole burden of her conversation was the lack of a school in St. Penfer by the Sea to which the fisher-children might go in the morning.
“Here be my six little uns,” she cried, “and up the cliff they must hurry all, through any wind or weather, or learn nothing. And then they be that tired when they do get home again, they be no use at all about the bait-boxes or the boats. There be sixty school-going children in the village, and I do say there ought to be a school here for them.”
And suddenly it came into the heart of Denas to open a school. Pay or no pay, she was sure she would enjoy the work, and that afternoon she went about it. An empty cottage was secured, a fisher-carpenter agreed to make the benches, and at an outlay of two or three pounds she provided all that was necessary. The affair made a great stir in the hamlet. She had more applications for admission than the cottage would hold, and she selected from these thirty of the youngest of the children.
For the first time in many months Denas was sensible of enthusiasm in her employment. But Joan did not apparently share her hopes or her pleasure. 304 She was silent and depressed and answered Denas with a slight air of injury.
“They have agreed to pay a penny a week for each child,” Denas said to her mother.
“Well, Denas, some will pay and some will never pay.”
“To be sure. I know that, mother. But it does not much matter.”
“Aw, then, it do matter, my girl––it do matter, a great deal.” And Joan began to cry a little and to arrange her crockery with far more noise than was necessary.
“Dear mother, what is it? Are you in trouble of any kind?”
“Aw, then, Denas, I be troubled to think you never saw your father’s trouble. He be sad and anxious enough, God knows. And no one to say ‘here, John,’ or ‘there, John,’ or give him a helping hand in any way.”