"But what will Frank and the other gentleman do?" queried Frank's sister.
"My dear, you mustn't inquire into such matters. Frank told me they would furnish themselves at a clothier's here, where they have ready-made garments for sale."
"It may be indelicate," said Lucia, "but I would rather picture them arrayed in ready-made nightgowns, bought in the metropolis of Colbury, than standing stiffly up on end, dressed in their usual attire all night. It is more humane."
Mrs. Laniston burst out laughing.
"There!" she suddenly exclaimed, rising and starting to the door, throwing the bunch of keys on the floor. "I beg and pray you to let my things alone, and, if you rummage through them, you do so without my consent, that's all."
Her last glance into the room was not reassuring. The lid of the precious trunk was already lifted, and the two girls on their knees before it were diving into its contents, shouldering each other in their eagerness, their countenances alight with keen curiosity and greedy expectancy of novelty.
Mrs. Laniston gave a sketch of their employment when she joined Jardine and Frank on the verandah outside the door of the large parlour. They had drawn forth a wicker rocking-chair for her from that apartment, and here, quietly and safely ensconced, she watched the evidences of storm to the east, as she swayed to and fro, with devout thankfulness that they had escaped its fury.
"How lucky that we did not start half an hour ago," she said. "We should have been in the thick of it."
"I hope you didn't say so to those girls," cried Frank. "They will make it a reason to be behind time for ever more—the dangers they escaped by never being ready!"
A grey curtain of cloud had fallen over the familiar scene to the east. It was null, inexpressive, motionless. It cut off the field of vision. There was no trace of mountain forms, of intervenient valleys and coves. There might seem naught beyond—some prairie country, this, whose low horizon brought down the sky to a level with the plain. Only now and then on the impalpable nullity was a flicker of red fire; in irregular zigzag lines it pulsed, and once and again the thunders of the remote tempest shook the sunbeams here. The gay carnival crowds in the square heeded the storm that burst elsewhere as little as sunshine ever cares for shadow. The contrast reminded her, Mrs. Laniston said, of the indifference of the happy in the world to the sadness of others. Their storms are brewing in the clouded future, to burst sometime, but all unprescient and unsympathising they sport like small insects of the stinging varieties—gnats, and gadflies, and wasps—in the glamour of to-day. "I think happiness, prosperity, give a sense of superiority. No doubt sorrow and adversity discipline the heart and soul and temperament, and form and strengthen the character; but any of us would rather be inferior than perfected at such a cost to comfort. I think the world is less and less ambitious of realising in one's self high standards and spiritual elevation. People only care to be thought fortunate and envied, now—not to be noble, in spite of all that fate can do."