“I think you are rather prone to exaggerate about Anne. She isn’t well, but these chronic invalids outlast the healthy.” Margaret had the occasional hardness of the very tender. “As to Rose, it is as well to comprehend the matter, and then, as the man seems unexceptionable, to let Rose alone.”
Mrs. Lyndsay’s good sense usually kept her at the end on the ways of reasonable decisions. If she could always have acted without speaking, she would have had more credit for wisdom. But acts are rare, and speech is not; so that people were apt to say, “Margaret Lyndsay is a very good woman, but not always very wise.” Those who knew her best did not so think, and especially Lyndsay, who well understood that great goodness cannot coexist with foolishness, because the more valuable goodness must have intelligence for one parent. There are people who reflect very little about what they are going to say, and a great deal about what they are about to do: of this kind was Lyndsay’s wife; but then, under some circumstances, words are acts, or have their force, and so she made mischief occasionally for herself and for others.
“I quite agree with you, my dear,” he replied. “It were best left to Rose’s good sense. In the end you and I are sure enough to agree.”
“Perhaps you might give Anne a hint, or—shall I?” She was a trifle afraid of her sister-in-law.
“It won’t be required. She has quite our own ideas about it”; and then Margaret knew that Anne had fully discussed this question with Lyndsay. She did not like it, but this time held her tongue.
The sun was low when they drew to the shore, a little above the point where Joe had left his dugout two days before. The oblong white box of a church stood on the upland, a dismal architectural symbol. Its closed doors and windows, the broken steps at the entrance, and the ragged, storm-worn paint looked dreary enough to Lyndsay as he passed with his wife through the open gateway.
“How hideous it is!” he said. “Would not you like it, my dear Margaret, if in the fall I had our boy brought home to rest among our own dead?”
“Very much, Archie.”
“It shall be done,” he said.
“Thank you.” By this time they had picked their way around the church amidst growth of thistles and wild raspberry vines. Lyndsay led, and presently they were in the scantily-peopled half-acre back of the chapel. He stood a moment, confused.