She sighed a little impatiently. Why could not mothers talk to their daughters with some show of reasonable equality? She was nearly a woman; surely her mother might have discussed that old-time story with her, seeing she had been compelled to hear of it from an outsider.
There was a sort of desperation on her that morning—she did so badly want some sort of guidance on the subject of her fitness to work for the Lamb Bursary. Presently she brought the talk back to the subject of the Bursary. She described the enrolment ceremony for her mother’s benefit, and she watched keenly to see the effect it would produce. She told how the provisions of the Bursary read that no girl could be a candidate whose parents had been in prison; she said no girl might enrol who knew herself guilty of cheating or stealing. She waxed really confidential, and told her mother of one girl whom she had seen stealing who had yet dared to enrol.
“That was very wrong of her,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, who was looking rather pale. “Should you not have told about her, Dorothy?”
“Oh, mother, I could not! They would have called me a sneak!” cried Dorothy in distress.
“Well, see to it, then, that the girl does not get a chance of winning the Bursary, or you will be compounding a felony.” Mrs. Sedgewick spoke brusquely, so it seemed to Dorothy, who felt that she could dare no more in the way of extracting guidance in her present dilemma. Several times she tried to say, “Mother, Mrs. Wilson told me about father having to go to prison—was it true?” but the words stuck in her throat—they positively refused to be uttered.
Then a doubt of her mother’s sense of honour crept into her mind. Tom declared that women had no hard-and-fast standpoints with regard to honour, and that it was second nature with them to behave in a way which would be reckoned downright dishonourable in a man.
Was it possible Tom was right? Dorothy set herself to watch her mother very carefully for the remainder of the vacation; but she got no satisfaction from the process, except that of seeing that her mother never once deviated from the lines of uprightness.
She was out with her father a great deal during those holidays. He was old-fashioned enough to still use a horse and trap for most of his professional work. Dorothy drove him on his rounds nearly every day. This should have been Tom’s work; but Tom was choosing to be very busy in other directions just then, and as Dorothy loved to be out with her father, she was quite ready to overlook Tom’s neglect of duty.
Never, never did she dare to ask him the question which she had tried to ask her mother. She spoke to him of Mrs. Wilson, and although his face kindled in a gleam of pleasure at hearing of an old acquaintance, he did not seem to care to talk about her, or of the part of his life in which she figured, and again Dorothy was up against a stone wall in her efforts at further enlightenment on that grim bit of history.
Then came the morning before the two went back to school, and, as usual, Dorothy was out with her father, whose round on this particular day took him to Langbury, where he had to see a patient who was also an old friend. He was a long time in that house; but the spring sunshine was so pleasant that Dorothy did not mind the waiting.