'If Frances had been here,' thought Jacinth, 'she would have been certain to begin about them and their father—only annoying Lady Myrtle and doing no good. Not but that I'm very sorry for them. I hope their father is better, I'm sure.'
Alas! these two or three months had not passed so quickly or so brightly in the—no, I must not say in the Harpers' pleasant though plain old house at Southcliff, for Hedge End was let, and the three girls were living in Mrs Newing's tiny rooms in Harbour Street—the rooms where Camilla had declared they would be so cosy and comfortable, enjoying a rest from all housekeeping cares.
And as far as the material details of their life was concerned they would have been more than content, though it was a new experience to them to be even temporarily without a home; and now and then Camilla and Bessie grew a little anxious about Margaret, and wondered if they were taking as good care of her as mother would have done. For the little girl looked very pale and delicate sometimes, and her appetite was fitful.
'I wonder if it is Mrs Newing's cooking,' said Camilla to her confidante, Bessie. 'At home we could always get some nice little thing; mother is so clever in that way, with father having been so long ill. But here it would be impossible to try to cook anything ourselves.'
'And whatever we do, we mustn't worry mother about Margaret,' said Bessie. 'Mother needs all the cheering possible to keep up her spirits, with dear father being so suffering still. Oh, Camilla, I wonder if we shall soon have better news?'
Things had not improved, even to the limited extent which was all that Captain Harper had counted upon, as rapidly as the former time that he had been an inmate of the private hospital for three months. He was weaker than then, and perhaps his intense anxiety to benefit by the effort that had in every sense cost them all so dear, was against him.
The doctors, so wrote Mrs Harper to her elder girls, now spoke of three months more, not as desirable but as a necessity. And how it was to be managed she could not see. Furthermore, to give a chance of anything approaching cure, or rather lasting improvement, the regulation visit to the German baths must, they now declared, be followed up by a winter in a mild, dry climate.
'Of this,' said the mother, 'we are not even thinking. The three more months here are all we can contemplate, and I dare not tell your father how impossible even that seems. It is out of the question, as he is, to move him to an ordinary hospital where I could not be with him. I believe if we did so he would give up the struggle and quietly resign himself to leaving us.'
'Camilla, he must stay,' said Bessie. 'There is one thing, these people do want to keep on the house longer?'
'For two months—not three,' said Camilla, 'and we have not yet given them a decided answer.'