“Oh yes,” said Betty, eager to remove any false impression she might have given. “She often says it would be better for me to have to depend a little more on myself.”
“I can scarcely picture your ever being very independent,” said Horace. “I should not like to do so. But—you may not always have her to take care of you, and yet not be left quite to your own devices!”
He glanced down at her as he spoke, with some scrutiny in his smile.
“No,” she replied, in a matter-of-fact tone, “of course there would still be Eira, though she says she would make me be the elder sister.”
Mr Littlewood turned away half abruptly. “Here we are,” he remarked, “this must be Mrs Silver’s abode!”
He was right. The young woman who was to act as their hostess, or, as she would have expressed it, “to serve tea to the gentlefolk,” was on the lookout for them. She was a pleasing-looking person, though of a slightly different type from the people about, with fairer hair and skin, which rather curiously contrasted with her dark eyes. For her mother had been an “inlander,” to use the term of the fisher-people for any one not purely of themselves. Her husband did not appear. He had been out for two days, she informed her visitors, on some remark being made about the weather and the fishing prospects, but she expected him home that evening.
“Isn’t it dreadfully dull for you when he is away?” asked Gertrude Charlemont, “and don’t you get terribly frightened if you hear the wind at night?”
The young woman shook her head with a little smile.
“We get used to it, miss,” she replied. And Mr Morion, whom the girl’s questions had struck as scarcely judicious, came to Mrs Silver’s assistance.
“Dwellers by the sea learn to have brave hearts,” he said; “and then there is always the pleasure of a safe home-coming to look forward to.”