"But it would be a change. I believe I'll suggest it to her in the morning."
But when Mrs. Shaw did suggest it the next morning, Hilary was quite of Pauline's opinion. "I shouldn't like it a bit, mother! It would be worse than home—duller, I mean; and Mrs. Boyd would fuss over me so," she said impatiently.
"You used to like going there, Hilary."
"Mother, you can't want me to go."
"I think it might do you good, Hilary. I should like you to try it."
"Please, mother, I don't see the use of bothering with little half-way things."
"I do, Hilary, when they are the only ones within reach."
The girl moved restlessly, settling her hammock cushions; then she lay looking out over the sunny garden with discontented eyes.
It was a large old-fashioned garden, separated on the further side by a low hedge from the old ivy-covered church. On the back steps of the church, Sextoness Jane was shaking out her duster. She was old and gray and insignificant looking; her duties as sexton, in which she had succeeded her father, were her great delight. The will with which she sang and worked now seemed to have in it something of reproach for the girl stretched out idly in the hammock. Nothing more than half-way things, and not too many of those, had ever come Sextoness Jane's way. Yet she was singing now over her work.
Hilary moved impatiently, turning her back on the garden and the bent old figure moving about in the church beyond; but, somehow, she couldn't turn her back on what that bent old figure had suddenly come to stand for.