“Get in!” And so, with some coaxing from Rose, the peacemaker, they got away.
“And I should like a boy-smudge, Anne,” said Lyndsay, who had quietly watched the proceedings on the shore.
“They are delightful.”
“You have no responsibility for them, my dear sister. You know what Marcus Aurelius says: ‘Irresponsibility arises from an unphilosophical indifference to—to—’”
“Consequences,” cried Anne, laughing. “You worry too much over the boys, Archie. I mean it. You take them too seriously. Permit me to say you are too consequentitious.”
“What a word! Did you make it? I can’t help worrying. I am always thinking of what their future will be. One should give some thought to the morrow, and other people’s morrows are the real difficulty.”
“See Marcus Aurelius, chapter third,” said Anne, maliciously. “‘To-morrow is only a stranger; when he is to-day consider how thou shalt entertain him.’”
“That is not my way, Anne.” And he left her, saying, “Jack is the one I fear for most.”
“I least,” said Anne to herself. “I shall not be here to see, whatever, as Tom says.” Then she sat down to her book about the Council of Trent, and by and by varied it with a little tough work on Cædmon’s Anglo-Saxon riddles, smiling as she read,—a good, half-dozen kind of smiles, of which she alone had the secret.
By and by came Margaret Lyndsay and sat down, her knitting-needles clicking, until Anne’s unlucky nervousness, kept in hand with difficulty, was viciously alive. At last Mrs. Lyndsay laid aside her work with a certain deliberation, for those who knew her best a signal of serious moment. She said, “You won’t mind, dear, if I say something I have had on my mind?”