“No, but we cannot tell them everything.”
“It is very difficult.”
“Could you not say that you fell on a rock, Aline?”
“That is not what I mean is difficult.”
“I do not understand.”
“I mean it is difficult to know how to speak the truth. Even if we do not say what is untrue we let them think wrongly.”
“Well, we cannot help that, Aline.”
“I do not know, it seems to me that it comes to the same thing as if we told them a falsehood.”
“Oh, bother them; if they ask no questions they will get told no stories.”
Aline’s mind was not satisfied; but, after all their calamities, fortune now favoured the children. There came a knock at the door and Elspeth, Audry’s old nurse, came in. “You are rather late this morning,” she said, and then she noticed that Aline was still in bed, “and one of you not up. Marry now, but it is a good thing for you that Mistress Mowbray has other things to think of this morning. She has just received an urgent letter from her sister at Appleby to say that she has been taken sick, and will she come over without delay. The serving man that brought the letter has only just now returned homeward.”