“Oh, mamsie, don’t talk so. I never could bear crusts, unless they were well buttered. I like everything to be nice, and to have plenty of it,—plenty of sunshine, and fun, and holiday-making, and friends; and—and now you are talking as though we must starve, and never have anything to wear, and go nowhere and be miserable forever?” And here Dulce broke into actual sobs; for was she not the petted darling? and had she not had a life so gilded by sunshine that she had never seen the dark edge of a single cloud? So that even Nan forgot Dick for a moment, and looked at her young sister pityingly; but Phillis interposed with bracing severity:
“Don’t talk such nonsense, Dulce. Of course we must eat to live, and of course we must have clothes to wear. Aren’t Nan and I thinking ourselves into headaches by trying to contrive how even the crusts you so despise are to be bought?” which was hardly true as far as Nan was concerned, for she blushed guiltily over this telling point in Phillis’s eloquence. “It only upsets mother to talk like this.” And then she touched the coals skilfully, till they spluttered and blazed into fury. “There is the Friary, you know,” she continued, looking calmly round on them, as though she felt herself full of resources. “If Dulce chooses to make herself miserable about the crusts, we have, at least, a roof to shelter us.”
“I forgot the Friary,” murmured Nan, looking at her sister with admiration; and, though Mrs. Challoner said nothing, she started a little as though she had forgotten it too. But Dulce was not to be comforted.
“That horrid, dismal, pokey old cottage!” she returned, with a shrill rendering of each adjective. “You would have us go and live in that damp, musty, fusty place?”
Phillis gave a succession of quick little nods.
“I don’t think it particularly dismal, or Nan either,” she returned, in her brisk way. Phillis always answered for Nan, and was never contradicted. “It is not dear Glen Cottage, of course, but we could not begin munching our crusts here,” she continued, with a certain grim humor. Things were apparently at their worst; but at least she,—Phillis,—the clever one, as she had heard herself called, would do her best to keep the heads of the little family above water. “It is a nice little place enough if we were only humble enough to see it; and it is not damp, and it is our own,” running up the advantages as well as she could.
“The Friary!” commented her mother, in some surprise: “to think of that queer old cottage coming into your head! 50 And it so seldom lets. And people say it is dear at forty pounds a year; and it is so dull that they do not care to stay.”
“Never mind all that, mammy,” returned Phillis, with a grave business-like face. “A cottage, rent-free, that will hold us, is not to be despised; and Hadleigh is a nice place, and the sea always suits you. There is the house, and the furniture, that belongs to us; and we have plenty of clothes for the present. How much did Mr. Trinder think we should have in hand?”
Then her mother told her, but still mournfully, that they might possibly have about a hundred pounds. “But there are my rings and that piece of point-lace that Lady Fitzroy admired so––” but Phillis waved away that proposition with an impatient frown.
“There is plenty of time for that when we have got through all the money. Not that a hundred pounds would last long, with moving, and paying off the servants, and all that sort of thing.”