“Thank you,” said Ethel, “I should like to be quiet till the evening, if you will let me off. It is very kind in you.”
“I ought to know how to pity you,” said Meta, “I who have gained what you have lost.”
“I want to think too,” said Ethel. “It is the beginning to me of a new life, and I have not been able to look at it yet.”
“Besides, Margaret will want you. Poor Margaret—has it been very trying to her?”
“I fear so, but I shall keep out of her way, and leave her to a quiet afternoon with Richard. It will be the greatest treat to those two to be together.”
“Very well, I will carry off the children, and leave the house quiet.”
And quiet it was in another hour—Gertrude walking with the nurses, Dr. May gone to his patients, and all the rest at Abbotstoke, except Richard and Margaret downstairs; and Ethel, who, while arranging her properties in her new room, had full leisure to lay out before herself the duties that had devolved on her and to grapple with them. She recalled the many counsels that she had received from Flora, and they sounded so bewildering that she wished it had been Conic sections, and then she looked at a Hebrew grammar that Norman had given her, and gave a sigh as she slipped it into the shelf of the seldom used. She looked about the room, cleared out the last piece of brown paper, and burned the last torn envelope, that no relic of packing and change might distress Margaret’s eyes for order; then feeling at once desolate and intrusive, she sat down in Flora’s fireside chair, opened her desk, and took out her last time-table. She looked at it for some minutes, laid it aside, and rising, knelt down. Again seating herself, she resumed her paper, took a blank one, ruled it, and wrote her rules for each hour of each day in the week. That first hour after breakfast, when hitherto she had been free, was one sacrifice; it must go now, to ordering dinner, seeing after stores, watching over the children’s clothes, and the other nondescripts, which, happily for her, Flora had already reduced to method. The other loss was the spare time between the walk and tea; she must not spend that in her own room now, or there would be no one to sit with Margaret, or keep the little ones from being troublesome to her. Ethel had often had to give up this space before, when Flora went out in the evening, and she had seldom felt otherwise than annoyed. Give it up for good! that was the cure for temper, but it had been valuable as something of her own. She would have been thankful could she have hoped to keep regularly to her own rules, but that she knew was utterly improbable—boys, holidays, callers, engagements, Dr. May, would all conspire to turn half her days upside down, and Cocksmoor itself must often depend not only on the weather, but on home doings. Two or three notes she wrote at the foot of her paper.
‘N. B. These are a standard—not a bed of Procrustes.
MUSTS—To be first consulted.—Mays—last. Ethel May’s
last of all.
If I cannot do everything—omit the self-chosen.
MEM— Neither hurry when it depends on myself,
nor fidget when it depends on others.
Keep a book going to pacify myself.’
Her rules drawn up, Ethel knelt once more. Then she drew a long sigh, and wondered where Flora was; and next, as she was fairly fagged, mind and body, she threw herself back in the armchair, took up a railway novel that Hector had brought home, and which they had hidden from the children, and repaired herself with the luxury of an idle reading.
Margaret and Richard likewise spent a peaceful, though pensive afternoon. Margaret had portions of letters from Alan to read to him, and a consultation to hold. The hope of her full recovery had so melted away, that she had, in every letter, striven to prepare Mr. Ernescliffe for the disappointment, and each that she received in return was so sanguine and affectionate, that the very fondness was as much grief as joy. She could not believe that he took in the true state of the case, or was prepared to perceive that she could never be his wife, and she wanted Richard to write one of his clear, dispassionate statements, such as carried full conviction, and to help to put a final end to the engagement.