“You need not be anxious about your trunk, Milly,” he said. “I will speak to the guard about it, and also about your dinner at Carlisle.” Very soon I saw him talking to that official, as if they were old friends, and the two men came to the carriage door together. Then Robert bid me good-bye, and with a bright smile promised to see me in Kendal Wednesday or Thursday. The next moment the door was locked, and the comfortable English guard cry, “All’s Right!” ran along the line until it reached the engineer, who answered it at once by starting the train.
The journey was an easy and pleasant one. I was well cared for, the children were quiet and sleepy, and I found Mother and Alethia waiting for me. About this my last visit to my home, I shall say little. A multitude of words could not reach the heart of it, and indeed we were all less disposed to talk than usual. I was exceedingly anxious. I had a fear of Robert’s mother, and while I was taking a walk the next day with Father, I told him a good deal about her. I thought he did not listen with his usual sympathy, and I asked “if he thought we had done wrong to come away without her knowledge?”
“Was it your doing, Milly?” he asked.
“Partly,” I answered. “Yes, Father, it was mainly my doing.”
“I don’t approve it, Milly,” he said. “A mother is a sacred relation. It is a kind of sacrilege to wound her feelings. You would need good reasons to excuse it.”
“We had good reasons, Father. Ask Robert when he comes tomorrow.”
“Yes, I will.” Then he gave me some personal advice, not necessary to write here, but which I hold in everlasting remembrance.
That night when all the house was asleep, and I was sitting with Mother, I told her Father’s opinion about our deceiving Robert’s mother. She was quietly angry.
“Do not mind what he said on that subject, Milly,” she said. “Your father thinks a deal more of mothers than he does of wives. Ever since we were married, he has gone into mourning about his mother on certain days, and he wanted the whole house to mourn and fast with him. I would not hear of such nonsense. We none of us knew the woman. Ann Oddy flatly refused; she was well aware I would stand by her. As for you children, I told your father plainly, you would, if you lived, have plenty of live troubles to fret you without mourning for a dead one, you knew nothing about. But all the same he never forgets certain days—you remember?”