Chapter Twelve.
Sea-Breezes.
And the hopefulness grew. For the improvement continued. That night of terrible anxiety had brought the crisis and the turning-point in more ways than one!
The news at noon was still good, by the evening better still, and thankfulness beyond words filled the hearts of Aunt Margaret and her little grand-nieces. And when the next day, and the days following, saw, in spite of some ups and downs of course, less and still lessening cause for anxiety, the thankfulness grew and grew and began to bear fruit. Never, I think I may safely say, never, in the course of their short lives, had Leila and Christabel been really happier than during the weeks they had still to remain at Mrs Greenall’s, though the rooms were small and crowded; the food plain, though neatly cooked; though they had to dress themselves and put away their hats and jackets, and even, now and then, under Aunt Margaret’s supervision, sew on a button and darn holes in their stockings! There were “ups and downs” in all this too, of course, as well as in little Jasper’s recovery; bad habits are seldom to be uprooted all at once; they are terribly clinging! But so, we may gratefully allow, are good ones also—a week of steady perseverance in doing a right thing, small though it may be, is something like “compound interest,” if you have come to that rule in your sums. It is really astonishing to find what progress may be made in the time.
“I really think, Auntie, we are beginning to learn to be neater and carefuller,” said Chrissie one Sunday morning when, passing their room on the way downstairs to go to church, she begged Miss Fortescue to “peep in.”
She glanced up brightly as she said it, and her aunt’s smile in return was bright also. But then Chrissie’s face clouded.
“There’s only one thing that keeps us miserable,” she murmured.
“Yes,” Leila agreed; “it always comes over me early in the morning, but Chrissie minds it most at night.”