"I am sure I could have managed the housekeeping," she said, "with Wharton's help. She has spent most of her life in the family, and really does all the practical part, Richard."
"But, my dear, you forget, just as I am apt to do, that after all I am a young man and a bachelor. How could you have your young girl friends here if there were no older lady to beam propriety over the domestic circle?"
"I thought of that at once, Dick," said Mina. "Of course, there must be some one who will be a little like the dear mother, and to whom we can go as we used to do to her. Jo and I thank you very much for Miss Pease, and if mother could have chosen for us, she would have said the same."
"Perhaps she did choose," replied Dick. "Only I wanted to know how you felt as well. You may like her all the better for being told that our mother, foreseeing that she would have to leave us, herself suggested the friend she loved as most suitable to fill the place in one sense. I had to tell Miss Pease this before she agreed to come. What do you think about it, Molly?"—to the girl who was clinging to his arm.
"That what mother and you settled must be the very best thing," she replied, squeezing the arm a little more closely.
There was only one discordant echo, and that was not in word, but in thought. Gertrude said to herself—
"I shall not put Miss Pease in my mother's place, or consult her and make her a confidante. She will be housekeeper and chaperone, if needs must, but that will be all. As to other girls coming here, I want none of them."
It was after some deliberation in her own room that Gertrude spied her brother in the garden, and asked for a few moments' quiet talk with him, and she found it rather difficult to begin when they both met in his little room; but Richard's kindly, "What is it, dear?" and the way in which he sat down beside her, so as to take away all appearance of formality from their talk, emboldened her to speak.
"I thought," she said, "that we should be told something about our circumstances. I know my mother had no need to make a will, but we girls are quite ignorant about our father's affairs, and as to what means we shall have of our very own. I wish you would tell us."
