Nina looked round anxiously.
“Come into the other room,” she said. “Bertha is in the ante-room; she hears the slightest movement. But I don’t think mamma is very soundly asleep, and our talking may disturb her.”
“We may as well go into the garden a little,” said Lettice indifferently.
“And what was it you were going to say when I interrupted you?” asked Nina, half timidly, when they found themselves pacing up and down a little raised terrace walk which overlooked the street.
Lettice reflected for a moment.
“Oh, I remember,” she said. “It was about mamma. Don’t you think sometimes, Nina, that all this suffering is weakening her mind a little? She doesn’t seem so clear about things, and it worries me. For of course, though I would like, after—after mamma is gone, to do exactly as she would have wished, yet one must discriminate between what her real wishes and advice are, or were, and the sort of weak—yielding to feeling—I—I don’t quite know what to call it—I don’t mean to be disrespectful, of course—that must have come with her long illness and the suffering and all that. And it makes it difficult for me, still more difficult, to discriminate, you know. For it is such a responsibility on me—such a heavy responsibility!” and Lettice gave a little sigh.
But something in the sigh seemed to say that the heavy responsibility was not altogether disagreeable to her.
Nina walked on, her blue eyes fixed on the ground, her fair face contracted into an expression of unusual perplexity. She could not bear to disagree with or contradict Lettice—Lettice so clever, so unselfish, so devoted—the heroine of all her girlish romance! And yet—
“I don’t think quite as you do about mamma,” she said at last. “I can’t say that I see any sign of—of her mind failing. On the contrary, as she grows bodily weaker it seems to me that her mind—her soul, I would almost rather say—grows wiser and stronger, and sees the real right and best of all things more and more clearly.”
She had forgotten her fear of Lettice in the last few words, but she soon had cause to remember it again.