“How did Diantha manage it?” asked her friend.
“She's been trying to arrange it for ever so long. Of course her father objected—you'd know that. But there's a sister—not a bad sort, only very limited; she's taken the old man to board, as it were, and I guess the mother really set her foot down for once—said she had a right to visit her own daughter!”
“It would seem so,” Mrs. Porne agreed. “I am so glad! It will be so much easier for that brave little woman now.”
It was.
Diantha held her mother in her arms the night she came, and cried tike a baby.
“O mother dear!” she sobbed, “I'd no idea I should miss you so much. O you blessed comfort!”
Her mother cried a bit too; she enjoyed this daughter more than either of her older children, and missed her more. A mother loves all her children, naturally; but a mother is also a person—and may, without sin, have personal preferences.
She took hold of Diantha's tangled mass of papers with the eagerness of a questing hound.
“You've got all the bills, of course,” she demanded, with her anxious rising inflection.
“Every one,” said the girl. “You taught me that much. What puzzles me is to make things balance. I'm making more than I thought in some lines, and less in others, and I can't make it come out straight.”