The girl did not reply. She felt the reasonableness of her mother's argument.
'But oh,' she thought to herself, 'I should hate to be indebted to Lady Myrtle for any help. What would I not do—what would we all not do, rather than that!'
Her feelings might almost have been written on her face, for Fitz, who had been listening silently, though intently, to the conversation, here made a remark which might have been a remonstrance with her unspoken protest.
'There's one thing to be said,' began the boy. 'Even though it's all Lady Myrtle's by law, it came to her from father's own grandfather. If our grandfather had been good, his share would have been his and then father's and then ours. There's a sort of right about it. It isn't as if it was all Lady Myrtle's own in any other way—through her husband, for instance—and that she did anything for us just out of pity, because we were relations. That would be horrid.'
Fitz was only fifteen, but he and Margaret seemed older than their years, as is not unusual with the youngest members of a large family. Besides, all the Harpers had grown up in full knowledge of and sympathy with their parents' anxieties. Living as they did, in closest family union, it would have been all but impossible to prevent its being so, save by some forced and unnatural reticence, the evil of which would have been greater than the risk of saddening the children by premature cares.
So neither Mrs Harper nor her daughter felt the least inclined to 'snub' the boy for his observation, which contained a strong element of common-sense.
'Lady Myrtle's wealth comes in part from her husband,' said Mrs Harper. 'That makes one feel the more strongly that the Harper portion should to some extent return to where it is so needed. But your father has told me that the Elvedons are sure to inherit some of it, and that is quite right.'
'And,' said Camilla, with a little effort, anxious to show her mother that she did wish to be quite 'fair-judging,' 'you know, Fitz, as we have often said, if our grandfather, being what he was, had got his share, it is most improbable that any of it would have come to father. After all,' she added with an honest smile that lighted up her quiet face and made it almost as bright as Bessie's—'after all, it was better for the money to be kept together by Lady Myrtle, than for it to be thrown away and nobody to have any good of it. She is a generous old woman, too, in outside ways. I see her name in connection with several philanthropic institutions.'
'And really good and well-managed things, your father says. She must be a wise and considerate woman,' said Mrs Harper.
'All the more pity, then, that she and father have never come together,' said Camilla with a sigh. 'She would be able to appreciate him. I never could imagine any one wiser and juster than father—though you come pretty near him sometimes, I must say, mother;' and she smiled again. 'Neither of you is ever the least bit unfair to any one, and it does take such a lot of self-control and—and—a wonderfully well-balanced mind, I suppose, to be like that.'