Chapter Thirteen.
Growing Interests.
Pleasant bits in life’s journey are in reality not unfrequently monotonous, though this fact may not be realised at the time. This much indeed is certain: that they often leave little for their chronicler to record.
With the coming of the Littlewoods to Craig-Morion, things in general took almost at once an aspect of new and unwonted interest for Frances and her sisters. There was no longer the dreary waking in the morning to the often reiterated question: “What shall we do with ourselves to-day?” For once its few “musts” and “oughts” had been attended to, and that dutifully, there yet always remained a doleful stretch of hours to fill up as best might be, and Frances’ anxious invention was taxed to the uttermost, in winter especially, to employ this enforced leisure, healthily as well as pleasantly, for the two younger ones, whose welfare was seldom if ever absent from her mind.
Now all seemed different. For even if meetings or expeditions of some kind were not planned for every day, and even if these same little plans were of the simplest and least exciting nature, there was always the consciousness of outside interest and sociability at hand, hitherto so peculiarly absent from the young lives at Fir Cottage.
Ten to one, before Frances had left her father’s study, where most mornings she wrote to his dictation business letters, more often than not entirely works of supererogation, or while Betty and Eira were doing their best to brighten up the drawing-room with such wintry spoils as were to be had, the parlour-maid would appear with a note from the big house, asking: “If one of you would care to drive with me this afternoon, and the others meet us at tea-time in my own room?”
This of course from Madeleine.
Or Horace would make his appearance with unacknowledged calculations as to its being an hour when the great bear was not to the fore, with a proposal, were the weather specially promising, for a good walk, not seldom in the direction of Scaling Harbour; as to the increasing attractions of which unique spot more hereafter.