'"CAMILLA" AND "MARGARET," YES.'
There was a great writing of letters during the next day or two at Robin Redbreast. And both Lady Myrtle and the children found it difficult to give their attention to anything but the absorbing subject of Mrs Mildmay's return.
And in response to a pressing invitation from the old lady, Miss Mildmay actually managed to spare or make time to come out to Robin Redbreast to 'spend the day'—that is to say, three or four hours of it, so that she and Lady Myrtle might have a talk about the plans under discussion.
The day chosen was the one in which Frances and Eugene were to return to Market Square Place. The big carriage was to take them and their aunt and Phebe home in the afternoon, leaving Jacinth for another week at Robin Redbreast.
Never had her nieces found Miss Mildmay so pleasant and almost genial. She was greatly delighted at the news of her sister-in-law's return—delighted and relieved. For it had begun to strike her rather uncomfortably that what she had undertaken was all but an impossibility. She was very conscientious, as I have said, and no self-deceiver. She saw that the girls, as they grew older, were becoming not less but more in need of sympathy and guidance in their out-of-school life—sympathy and guidance which at best she felt very doubtful of being able to give them, even if she sacrificed all the other duties and occupations which had for so many years made her life, for their sakes. And the sacrifice would have been a very tremendous one.
The doubts and perplexities were increasing daily in her mind when there came this most welcome and little expected news, followed by the almost as welcome tidings of Lady Myrtle's eager offer of hospitality to the children's mother.
'It is very good, very, very kind and good of her,' said Miss Mildmay to herself. 'The children's making friends with her really seems to have brought good-luck. And she may be of lasting and substantial help to Frank and Eugenia. Not exactly because she is rich—Frank is far too proud to take anybody's money—but she may have interest that would be of use to him. And there would be nothing unnatural in her leaving something to Eugenia or to Jacinth. I don't suppose she means to leave everything to the Elvedons, for a good deal would have been her own share in any case, and a good deal her husband must have left her. By the bye, I have always forgotten to ask Miss Scarlett if the Harper girls she has, or had—some one said they had left—were any relation to the Elvedon family. Nice girls, evidently, but very badly off, I fancy.'
And then she forgot about the Harpers again.
But with her grateful feelings to Lady Myrtle, Miss Mildmay naturally felt that the least she could do was to clear a day for herself by working extra hard, so as to be able to spend part of it at Robin Redbreast, as the old lady much wished her to do.
And she was in her happiest and most cheerful mood, and all would have gone just as Jacinth wished, but for one unfortunate allusion, which came in the first place, strange to say, from considerate, cautious Miss Alison Mildmay herself.