For a while, after that talk with her mother, Mona worked with a will. She swept, and scrubbed, and polished the stove and the windows and helped with the washing and ironing, until Lucy laughingly declared there would soon be nothing left for her to do.
"That's just what I want," declared Mona. "I want you not to have anything to do. Perhaps I can't manage the cooking yet, but I'll learn to in time." Excited by the novelty and change, and buoyed up by the prospect of her new hat, and new frocks and aprons too, she felt she could do anything, and could not do enough in return for all that was to be done for her, and, when Mona made up her mind to work, there were few who could outdo her. She would go on until she was ready to drop.
As the spring days grew warmer, she would get so exhausted that Lucy sometimes had to interfere peremptorily, and make her stop. "Now you sit right down there, out of the draught, and don't you move a foot till I give you leave. I will get you a nice cup of tea, and one of my new tarts; they're just this minute ready to come out of the oven."
A straight screen, reaching from floor to ceiling, stood at one side of the door, to keep off some of the draught and to give some little privacy to those who used the kitchen. Mona dried her hands and slipped gratefully into the chair that stood between the screen and the end of the table.
"Oh, mother, this is nice," she sighed, her face radiant, though her shoulders drooped a little with tiredness.
"Isn't it beautiful? I love these sunny, quiet afternoons, when everything is peaceful, and the sea quite calm." Her eyes looked beyond the little kitchen to the steep, sunny street outside, and beyond that again to where the blue sea heaved and glittered in the distance. The little window, as well as the door, stood wide open, letting in the scent of the sun-warmed wallflowers, and box, and boy's love. The bees buzzed contentedly over the beds. One made his way in to Lucy's plants in the window.
"I seem to smell the sea even through the scent of the flowers," said Lucy.
"I am sure I do. I can't think how people can choose to live inland, can you, mother?"
"I don't suppose they choose, they just live where God has seen fit to place them—where their work lies."
"Well, I hope my work will always be in some place near the sea," said Mona decidedly. "I don't think I could live away from it."