Then began work.
"Since we haven't been doing anything for the last two months," said Mary Burton, with a merry laugh, "I suppose we can have the privilege of going to work now."
Meantime, the days had been moving steadily on. Christmas holidays had come and gone, and the boys, as well as the girls, to whom the holiday season had been apt to be a time of special dissipation and temptation, had been tided safely over it by reason of being so busy that they had no time for their usual festivities. The vacation to which Claire Benedict had looked forward with sad heart, on her first coming to South Plains, because it would be a time when she might honorably go home if she could afford it, and she knew she could not, had come and passed, and had found her in such a whirl of work, so absorbed from morning until night, as to have time only for postals for the mother and sister.
"When the rush of work is over," so she wrote, "I will stop for repairs, and take time to write some respectably lengthy letters, but just now we are so overwhelmed with our desire to get the church ready for Easter Sunday that we can think of nothing else. Mamma, I do wish you and Dora could see it now, and again after it emerges from under our hands!"
"What is the matter with her?" asked Dora, and then mother and daughter laughed. It was impossible to be very dreary with those breezy postals constantly coming from Claire. It was impossible not to have an almost absorbing interest in the church at South Plains, and think of, and plan for it accordingly.
"Mamma," Dora said, after having read the latest postal, as she sat bending it into various graceful shapes, "I suppose that church down on the beach that the girls of our society are working for, looks something like the one at South Plains. I think I will join that society after all; I suppose I ought to be doing something, since Claire has taken up the repairing of old churches for a life-business."
This last with a little laugh, and the mother wrote to Claire a few days later:
"Your sister has finally succeeded in overcoming her dislike to joining the benevolent society again, and is becoming interested in their work. They have taken up that seaside church again which you were going to do such nice things for, you know. Dora has felt all the time that there was nothing for her to do now, because we are poor, and has held aloof, but yesterday she joined the girls, and brought home aprons to make for the ready-made department of Mr. Stevenson's store. The plan is that Mr. Stevenson shall furnish shades for the church windows at cost, and the girls are to pay him by making up aprons for that department. I am glad for anything that rouses Dora; not that she is bitter, but she is sad, and feels herself useless. My dear, you are doing more than repairing the church at South Plains; you are reaching, you see, away out to the seaside."