'Of course. I know Jacinth is very, very thoughtful for me,' she said. 'And I see that you understand it, my dear Miss Mildmay. Not that I am vexed with little Frances. I like children to be children, and of all things I like a loyal friend.'
Then she at once and with evident intention, which the others were quick to read, changed the subject of conversation. On the whole, vexed though she was with Frances's persistence—'self-willed obstinacy' as she called it to herself—Jacinth felt that the dreaded crisis had passed off better than might have been expected, and in some things it was a relief. Things were on a clearer basis now.
'It was bound to come, I suppose,' she said to herself. 'Mamma seems almost as impulsive and quixotic as Frances—quite bewitched by these people. But at worst there's nothing more to tell now, and Lady Myrtle appreciates my feelings if no one else does.'
Frances, on her side, though her heart was still beating tumultuously, felt glad that she had had the courage and opportunity to say what she had. But for her dread of a private reprimand from Jacinth afterwards, the little girl would on the whole have had a somewhat lightened heart about her friends. For, as she said to herself, 'Lady Myrtle had certainly not seemed angry.'
Strange to say, the anticipated reproof from Jacinth never came. It was true there was not much time for any private talk between the sisters, for Frances and Eugene went back to Market Square Place that same afternoon with their aunt. But even when, a week later, Jacinth herself rejoined them there a day or two before the reopening of Ivy Lodge school, there was no mention of the Harpers, and no allusion to what had passed at luncheon the day of Miss Mildmay's visit to Robin Redbreast.
'Can it be that Lady Myrtle is really going to be kind to them, and that she told Jacinth not to be vexed with me?' thought sanguine little Frances. She would have felt less hopeful had she known that not one word had passed between her sister and the old lady on the subject of her unknown relations. And Jacinth had simply made up her mind to think no more about them; her conscience now being, or so at least she told herself, completely at rest—the matter entirely out of her hands.
It was the easier to carry out this resolution that Bessie and Margaret's places were vacant, though no one seemed very clearly to understand why they had not returned, and the Misses Scarlett expressed the heartiest regret that they had not done so. Honor Falmouth too had left, but this had been known by anticipation to her companions for some time. And in the little world of a school, as in the bigger world outside, it is not for long that the circles in the waters of daily life mark the spot of any disappearance; it has to be so, and does not necessarily imply either heartlessness or caprice. We are limited as to our powers in all directions—the more marvellous that somewhere, invisible, unsuspected, our innermost self lives on. And far down, below the surface restlessness and change, may we not hope that we shall find again the fibres of loving friendships and pure affections whose roots were deep and true, though at times it may seem that like other precious and beautiful things they were but as a dream?
Frances missed her friends sadly, the more so that not knowing their exact address, and half afraid also to do such a thing on her own responsibility, she could not write to them. But nothing depressed Frances now for very long or very deeply. She had found a panacea. All would be right soon, 'when mamma comes home.'
