“Oh,” said Betty coolly, “that was because he was like a little Murillo! and his mother looked quite fierce.”
“Nonsense,” said Frances. “She was intensely gratified and horribly shy. If our poor friends can be so misunderstood, Madeleine, I think on the whole we had better not suggest Mrs Conrad Littlewood’s visiting them. Is it next week she and your brother are coming?”
“Yes,” Madeleine replied. “We must make the best of our time till then.”
And she and Frances went on talking together on the subject which their conversation had drifted into—“that everlasting Scaling Harbour,” as naughty Betty called it.
“I hope,” said Eira, when Madeleine had left them and they were turning in at their own gate, “I hope Horace Littlewood will come back a few days before those other people come up—just for us to have a sort of Saint Martin’s Summer of what this winter has been. For I feel convinced that once they are here it will be the real good-bye to it all.”
“Or,” thought Frances in her secret heart, “the real beginning;” but aloud she said nothing, though she endorsed Eira’s hopes as regarded Horace’s return. Somehow—how was it, she asked herself, that she felt more drawn to him, more nearly sure of her own capacity for responding to the devotion which, from her first suspicion of its existence, had profoundly touched and gratified her, in his absence than when actually with him? Was it always so, she wondered, or was she in any way, thanks to her delayed experience in such things, exceptional? If only there were any one, any woman, she could quite entirely confide in! If her mother had been what—in fiction at least—some mothers are to their daughters—closer, in fuller sympathy, more able, as it were, to recall her own youth and the perplexities, hopes, and fears which doubtless had their place in it—how gladly would Frances have confided in her! But as things were, this would have been useless, nay, more than useless, impossible.
“I know,” she thought, “how good and unselfish mamma is. Never was there a better wife, but I have read somewhere that every woman is more wife than mother, or vice versa. I think the former must be the case with mamma, and in one way I should be glad of it, for I think it has given more object and motive to my own life, in the trying to be a real elder sister to the others.”
Eira’s hopes as to what she had spoken of as a “Saint Martin’s Summer,” in connection with the pleasant experiences of the last two or three months, were not destined to be fulfilled.
For the expected guests at Craig-Morion arrived there some days before Horace Littlewood’s own return.
A day or two afterwards Lady Emma called, but found no one at home, somewhat to the disappointment of her daughters, whose curiosity concerning Mrs Littlewood the younger had been naturally aroused by Madeleine’s description of her. All the more welcome, therefore, was Madeleine’s own appearance at Fir Cottage about five o’clock the following afternoon.