"Yes, always good friends, Elizabeth. They were happy times when you and I used to play together in the old barn, and go out gathering primroses and violets in spring, and blackberries in autumn, all alone by ourselves," said Walter, with a sigh.
"They were too happy to last, Walter; but, you know, I never took to either of the others as I did to you, even when we were all children. They were mostly ready to quarrel with me if I didn't let them have their way, and they were younger than me. But it was different with you; you were older than me, and you always took my part, and we shared what we either of us had; and if it hadn't been for—oh dear, oh dear!" And here the sister could not restrain herself, but broke into loud, sorrowful lamentations.
"Don't distress yourself, Elizabeth dear. We always were good friends, as you say, and so we are now. And it being so, let us talk to one another as we used to do when we went hand in hand over the fields together, telling our little secrets and troubles."
"Oh, Walter, but we are man and woman now!"
"But brother and sister too; nothing can alter that. And I want you to tell me if there isn't something here at your home—" (Walter could not bring himself to say our home, or my old home)—"something at your home that makes you unhappy?"
"Well, come to that, there are a good many things not altogether agreeable," Elizabeth answered, more composedly, and yet with apparent bitterness of feeling; "it is not pleasant to be treated as a child, as I many times am, and at forty years old, too, if a day, as you know, Walter."
"Yes, of course you are," said the brother; "but I should have thought you had known how to hold your own too, and would not have allowed any one to put upon you, or treat you as a child, as you say. I think I have noticed a good deal of spirit in you at times, Elizabeth."
"Yes, likely enough in some things. There are some things that none of them, not even father, cares to say to me, nor even to talk about when I am by; and he knows the reason why. But when it comes to work—about the house, I mean—and how it is to be done, and who is to do it, I am just nobody to be considered," said the sister. "There isn't a servant girl in the place slaves as I do, Walter; and that you must have seen."
Walter had seen that his sister worked very hard, was up early in the morning, was the last to go to bed, and seemed to have her hands full of household matters all day long. He said this.
"Well, then, isn't that enough to make one go wild with vexation? But that isn't the worst. You heard what mother said to me only yesterday at dinner-time? The servant girl there to hear it too?"