“Am I a comfort to you, mother?” asked Fern, wistfully, and something in those earnest gray eyes thrilled the widow’s heart with fresh pangs of memory.
“You are my one bit of sunshine,” she answered, fondly, taking the girl’s face between her hands and kissing it almost passionately. “Keep bright for your poor mother’s sake, Fern.”
Fern never forgot this little speech. She understood, then, that her mission was to be her mother’s comforter; and with the utmost sweetness and unselfishness she put aside her own longings for her brother, and strove to make up for his loss. So Fern bloomed in her poor home like some lovely flower in a cottage garden, growing up to womanhood in those rooms over Mrs. Watkins’s.
Fern had long since finished her education, and now gave morning lessons to the vicar’s little daughters. In her leisure hours she made her simple gowns and Fluff’s frocks, and taught the child the little she could be persuaded to learn, for Fluff was a spoiled child and very backward for her age; and one or two people, Mrs. Watkins among them, had given it as their opinion that little Florence was not all there, rather odd and uncanny in fact.
Fern was quite contented with her life. She was fond of teaching and very fond of her little pupils. Her pleasures were few and simple; a walk with Crystal or Fluff to look at the shops, perhaps an omnibus journey and an hour or two’s ramble in the Park or Kensington Garden, a cozy chat with her mother in the evening, sometimes, on grand occasions, a shilling seat at the Monday or Saturday Popular.
Fern loved pretty things, but she seemed quite satisfied to look at them through plate glass; a new dress, a few flowers, or a new book were events in her life. She would sing over her work as she sat sewing by the window; the gay young voice made people look up, but they seldom caught a glimpse of the golden-brown head behind the curtain. Fern had her dreams, like other girls; something, she hardly knew what, would happen to her some day. There was always a prince in the fairy stories that she told Fluff, but she never described him. “What is he like?” Fluff would ask with childish impatience, but Fern would only blush and smile, and say she did not know. If, sometimes, a handsome boyish face, not dark like Percy, but with a fair, budding mustache and laughing eyes, seemed to rise out of the mist and look at her with odd wistfulness, Fern never spoke of it; a sort of golden haze pervaded it. Sometimes those eyes were eloquent, and seemed appealing to her; a strange meaning pervaded the silence; in that poor room blossomed all sorts of sweet fancies and wonderful dreams as Fern’s needle flew through the stuff.
As Fluff rubbed her rough head confidingly against her shoulder, Fern gave a musical little laugh that was delicious to hear. “You absurd child,” she said, in an amused tone, “I really must tell Mr. Erle not to take you again to the Zoölogical Gardens; you talk of nothing but bears and jaguars. So you want a story, you are positively insatiable, Fluff; how am I to think of one with my wits all wool-gathering and gone a-wandering like Bopeep’s sheep? It must be an old one. Which is it to be? ‘The Chocolate House,’ or ‘Princess Dove and the Palace of the Hundred Boys.’”
“Humph,” returned Fluff, musingly; “well, I hardly know. ‘The Chocolate House’ is very nice, with its pathway paved with white and pink sugar plums, and its barley-sugar chairs; and don’t you remember that, when Hans was hungry, he broke a little brown bit off the roof; but after all, I think I like ‘Princess Dove and the Palace of the Hundred Boys’ best. Let us go on where you left off.”
“Where we left off?” repeated Fern, in her clear voice. “Yes, I recollect. Well, when Prince Happy-Thought—”
“Merrydew,” corrected the child.