"I guess ministers are used to people coming to them with all their troubles," she began, with a plaintive little note creeping into her usually cheery voice, "and I do hope you won't think I'm trying to spoil your vacation by troubling you with ours; but Cap'n March and I have talked and talked till we ain't on speaking terms with our own judgments any more, and what to do next I don't know." Then she, too, told the story.
At the end of her hurried recital she said:
"What she thinks of Tom I don't know; she's awfully close-mouthed about some things. I like Tom, and if I had my way I guess I'd let the young folks settle it themselves. But Cap'n March he's different. He's going to take it for granted that she won't think of Tom because her father disapproves of her marrying a sailor; and he will be so sure of it, and so exasperating, that I don't know what he'll make her do first—marry Tom or go right off to China. In the end he'll let her do just what she makes up her mind to do. He always did, and he always will. If it's one thing, I don't care; but to think of her going off alone to the other side of the world—" She picked up her work and began to knit rapidly, with fast-falling tears.
Drew sat with his elbow on the back of the chair, his chin in the palm of his hand, looking down at the floor.
"I wish I knew what to say—to advise, Mrs. March," he now said; "but I do not. Perhaps after a while—"
"Yes," she broke in eagerly; "that's all we could expect. I told Cap'n March I was going to speak to you, and he seemed real pleased. I'm sure you'll think of some way out," she added, with the cheerful optimism with which we shift the burden of our desperate affairs to the shoulders of others. It is hard to believe that Fate will continue unkind when our friends are moved. "And I hope," she went on, "that you won't feel it a duty to encourage Hetty's missionary notions. Of course you're a minister and believe in missionaries, and I shouldn't ask you to go against your conscience; but I suppose you can believe in them without thinking that everybody's fit for the work. I'm sure Hetty isn't. All the missionary women I ever saw were thin and homely, and their clothes seemed just thrown at them. Hetty isn't a bit like that. I can say so, if she is my daughter. And I've scarcely seen her for three years; and if now she should go away to live at the end of the world among heathen idols, with not a homelike thing, and no one to mother her when she needs mothering, then I think that religion is very kind to the heathen, who don't want it, and very cruel to a mother who has always been a God-fearing woman and only wants her child near her when she comes to die. She's all I've got."
She had been speaking with increasing rapidity, but now a light footfall sounded on deck, going aft, and she stopped.
"Go up on deck," she said to Drew. "I don't want her to know I've ever mentioned this to you. She's a dear girl, but sometimes I feel like a hen who is the mother of a duckling. What she's going to do next I don't know."
Drew met the girl by the corner of the house.
"I've been showing father the stars," she said. "He, a sailor, and not to know them! I told him I thought it shameful."