That night, after dinner, Mrs. Mariner asked Jill to read to her.
"Print tries my eyes so, dear," said Mrs. Mariner.
It was a small thing, but it had the significance of that little cloud that arose out of the sea like a man's hand. Jill appreciated the portent. She was, she perceived, to make herself useful.
"Of course I will," she said cordially. "What would you like me to read?"
She hated reading aloud. It always made her throat sore, and her eye skipped to the end of each page and took the interest out of it long before the proper time. But she proceeded bravely, for her conscience was troubling her. Her sympathy was divided equally between these unfortunate people who had been saddled with an undesired visitor and herself who had been placed in a position at which every independent nerve in her rebelled. Even as a child she had loathed being under obligations to strangers or those whom she did not love.
"Thank you, dear," said Mrs. Mariner, when Jill's voice had roughened to a weary croak. "You read so well." She wrestled ineffectually with her handkerchief against the cold in the head from which she had always suffered. "It would be nice if you would do it every night, don't you think? You have no idea how tired print makes my eyes."
On the following morning after breakfast, at the hour when she had hitherto gone house-hunting with Mr. Mariner, the child Tibby, of whom up till now she had seen little except at meals, presented himself to her, coated and shod for the open and regarding her with a dull and phlegmatic gaze.
"Ma says will you please take me for a nice walk!"
Jill's heart sank. She loved children, but Tibby was not an ingratiating child. He was a Mr. Mariner in little. He had the family gloom. It puzzled Jill sometimes why this branch of the family should look on life with so jaundiced an eye. She remembered her father as a cheerful man, alive to the small humours of life.
"All right, Tibby. Where shall we go?"