“That’s a big question, Eira,” she said, trying to speak lightly. “We must believe that the circumstances of every life are, to a certain point at least, meant—intended.” And her voice changed as she went on, more slowly and seriously: “The puzzle is to find out the point at which we should resist them, and not carry resignation or submission too far.”
“There’s not much puzzle about it for us,” said Betty. “We are pretty clearly hedged in! Papa and mamma would never allow us to take any sort of line of our own.”
“Then, for the present at least,” said Frances, “the line is drawn, and I suppose if by the end of life one had learnt perfect patience one would have learnt a good deal; but still—”
“Still what?” said Eira.
“I am not quite ready to say what is in my mind,” replied her sister. “Perhaps it will come when I have thought more about it. Roughly speaking, I was considering if there is nothing that we can do—nothing that I can help you two to do, in the way of extending your interest a little, even as things are. And, of course, the best way to do that is to look out for what we can reach of helping others.”
“We do do what we can, I think, Francie,” said Eira, in a tone of some disappointment. “We have our Sunday-school classes, and Betty’s blind old man and my bedridden old woman that we go to read to; but beyond that there are always the old difficulties: papa’s opposition and—want of money. I’m sure now we could do a lot at Scaling Harbour, among the fisher-children—such a terribly rough set—if we had money and a little more freedom.”
“I know,” said Frances quietly; but, though for the moment the subject dropped, she thought the more.
And the next few weeks gave her both leisure and cause for ever-deepening reflection.
The weather was unusually and monotonously disagreeable. Raw, grey, and as cold as weather can be when it just falls short of the stimulus and exhilaration which, to the young and strong at least, usually accompany frost. Letters, rare at all times, dwindled down to almost none. Even a family chronicle from their ex-governess, now a settler’s wife in the Far West, was hailed almost enthusiastically as a welcome distraction.
“There is only one thing in the world that I have to be thankful for,” said Eira one day, when, defiant of wind and threatening rain, they started for their afternoon walk, “and that is, that, thanks to you, Francie, and all the wonderful things you’ve done for me and made me do, my chilblains haven’t got bad again—not since—oh, yes! do you remember?—not since the time Mr Littlewood was here.”