CHAPTER XIII.
MAMMA.
At Thetford the weeks till Easter—it came in the middle of April that year—passed quickly. It is true that every morning, when Frances scored out one of the long row of little lines she had made to represent the days till that of her mother's arrival, she could not repress a sigh at the number yet remaining. But still the time, even for her, passed quickly. For she was busy—working more steadily at her lessons than ever before, in the hope of having satisfactory progress to show—and full of the happiest anticipations. Morning and night the faithful, simple-hearted girl added to her other petitions the special one that things might be so over-ruled as to prevent the necessity of further separation.
'It can't be wrong to ask it,' she said to herself, 'for God made fathers and mothers and children to be together. It's something wrong somewhere when they can't be. And I've got a feeling that it is going to be like that for us now. I don't care a bit where we live—that place in the north or anywhere—if only we're with them.'
Jacinth, too, on the whole was happy in her own way. Personally, perhaps, she longed less for her mother's presence and sympathy than Frances did, for she was by nature more self-sufficing. And when one scarcely knows till one is fifteen or sixteen what it is to have a mother and a real home of one's own, small wonder if the inestimable blessings of such possessions are barely realised. Then, too, Jacinth's frequent visits to Lady Myrtle, and the old lady's ever-increasing affection for and interest in her had almost filled up the voids the girl had at first felt bitterly enough in her new life. She would in many ways have been quite content for things to go on as they were for a year or two. And if she built castles in the air, it must be allowed that Lady Myrtle was to a great extent responsible for their construction.
'I can scarcely fancy feeling as if mamma were more of a mother to me than you seem now,' she said one day to her old friend.
'Nay,' Lady Myrtle replied, 'I must represent a grandmother. You really do not know what a mother feels like, dear child.'
'Well,' Jacinth went on, 'perhaps that's it. But somehow I think mamma will seem more a sort of elder sister to me. And I hope she will take it that way. We shall get on better if she does. I—I'm afraid I shouldn't be very good about giving in. You see I've never had to do it much.'