'And still I changed—I was a boy no more;
My heart was large enough to hold my kind,
And all the world. As hath been apt before
With youth, I sought, but I could never find
Work hard enough to quiet my self-strife,
And the strength of action craving life.
She, too, was changed.'—Jean Ingelow.
In the histories of most families there are long even pauses during which life flows smoothly in uneventful channels, when there are few breaks and fewer incidents to chronicle; times when the silent ingathering of individual interests deepens and widens imperceptibly into an under-current of strength ready for the crises of emergency. Times of peace alternating with the petty warfare which is the prerogative of kinsmanship, a blessed routine of daily duty misnamed by the young monotony, but which in reality is to train them for the rank and file in the great human army hereafter; quiescent times during which the memory of past troubles is mercifully obliterated by present ease, and 'the cloud no bigger than a man's hand' does not as yet obscure the soft breadth of heaven's blue.
Such a time had come to the Lamberts. The three years that followed Olive's illness and tardy convalescence were quite uneventful ones, marked with few incidents worthy of note; outwardly things had seemed unchanged, but how deep and strong was the under-current of each young individual life; what rapid developments, what unfolding of fresh life and interests in the budding manhood and womanhood within the old vicarage walls.
Such thoughts as these came tranquilly to Mildred as she sat alone one July day in the same room where, three years before, the Angels of Life and Death had wrestled over one frail girl, in the room where she had so patiently and tenderly nursed Olive's sick body and mind back to health.
For once in her life busy Mildred was idle, the work lay unfolded beside her, while her eyes wandered dreamily over the fair expanse of sunny green dotted with browsing sheep and tuneful with the plaintive bleating of lambs; there was a crisp crunching of cattle hoofs on the beck gravel below, a light wind touched the elms and thorns and woke a soft soughing, the tall poplar swayed drowsily with a flicker of shaking leaves; beyond the sunshine lay the blue dusk of the circling hills, prospect fit to inspire a daydream, even in a nature more prosaic than Mildred Lambert's.
It was Mildred's birthday; she was thirty to-day, and she was smiling to herself at the thoughts that she felt younger and brighter and happier than she had three years before.
They had been such peaceful years, full of congenial work and blessed with sympathetic fellowship; she had sown so poorly, she thought, and had reaped such rich harvests of requited love; she had come amongst them a stranger three years ago, and now she could number friends by the score; even her poorer neighbours loved and trusted her, their northern reserve quite broken down by her tender womanly graces.
'There are two people in Kirkby Stephen that would be sorely missed,' a respectable tradesman once said to Miss Trelawny, 'and they are Miss Lambert and Dr. Heriot, and I don't know which is the greater favourite. I should have lost my wife last year but for her; she sat up with her three nights running when that fever got hold of her.'
And an old woman in the workhouse said once to Dr. Heriot when he wished her to see the vicar: