At Thetford the weeks till Easter—it came in the middle of April that year—passed quickly. It is true that every morning, when Frances scored out one of the long row of little lines she had made to represent the days till that of her mother's arrival, she could not repress a sigh at the number yet remaining. But still the time, even for her, passed quickly. For she was busy—working more steadily at her lessons than ever before, in the hope of having satisfactory progress to show—and full of the happiest anticipations. Morning and night the faithful, simple-hearted girl added to her other petitions the special one that things might be so over-ruled as to prevent the necessity of further separation.

'It can't be wrong to ask it,' she said to herself, 'for God made fathers and mothers and children to be together. It's something wrong somewhere when they can't be. And I've got a feeling that it is going to be like that for us now. I don't care a bit where we live—that place in the north or anywhere—if only we're with them.'

Jacinth, too, on the whole was happy in her own way. Personally, perhaps, she longed less for her mother's presence and sympathy than Frances did, for she was by nature more self-sufficing. And when one scarcely knows till one is fifteen or sixteen what it is to have a mother and a real home of one's own, small wonder if the inestimable blessings of such possessions are barely realised. Then, too, Jacinth's frequent visits to Lady Myrtle, and the old lady's ever-increasing affection for and interest in her had almost filled up the voids the girl had at first felt bitterly enough in her new life. She would in many ways have been quite content for things to go on as they were for a year or two. And if she built castles in the air, it must be allowed that Lady Myrtle was to a great extent responsible for their construction.

'I can scarcely fancy feeling as if mamma were more of a mother to me than you seem now,' she said one day to her old friend.

'Nay,' Lady Myrtle replied, 'I must represent a grandmother. You really do not know what a mother feels like, dear child.'

'Well,' Jacinth went on, 'perhaps that's it. But somehow I think mamma will seem more a sort of elder sister to me. And I hope she will take it that way. We shall get on better if she does. I—I'm afraid I shouldn't be very good about giving in. You see I've never had to do it much.'

She smiled a little as she made the confession.

'I can scarcely imagine you anything but docile, my dear,' said Lady Myrtle; 'but then, of course, I know I have not seen you really tested. I fancy, however, there will be a mingling of the elder-sisterly feeling in your relations to your mother, and I hope there will be. I think she has a high opinion of your good sense and judgment, and I don't expect that she will have any cause to change her opinion.'

Jacinth sat silent for a moment or two. She seemed to be thinking deeply; her eyes were fixed on the fire, where the wooden logs were throwing out brilliant gleams of varying colours, reflected on the bright brasses of the grate and fender.

'How pretty everything here always is!' she said at last. 'Even to the burning wood. Look, Lady Myrtle, it is blue and purple and even green.'

'They are old ship logs,' her friend replied. 'It is the brine in them that makes the colours.'

'Oh dear,' said Jacinth again with a little sigh, 'how I should love a pretty home. Lady Myrtle, I am afraid you will be shocked at me, but do you know I sometimes almost feel I would rather papa and mamma went back to India next year than that we should have to go to live at that horrible dingy Barmettle.'

Lady Myrtle was not shocked. Still, she was too unselfish by nature herself not to be quick to check any symptoms of an opposite character in one she really cared for, glad though she was to have Jacinth's full confidence.

'I think you would bear such a trial as that, readily and cheerfully, if it were for your father and mother's good,' she said. 'And after all, where we live is not of the importance that I daresay it seems to you. Some of the truly happiest people I have ever known have been so in spite of the most uncongenial surroundings you can imagine.'

'I'm not as good as that,' said Jacinth in a melancholy voice. 'I can't bear ugly, messy places; above all, messy, untidy places make me perfectly cross and miserable.'

Lady Myrtle could not help laughing a little at her tragic tone.

'I don't see that, even if you had to live at Barmettle, your home need be ugly and untidy,' she said.

'I don't know. I've been thinking a good deal about it,' Jacinth replied. 'You see, mamma will have been so long in India that she will have got out of English ways. She must be accustomed to lots of servants and to have everything done for her. I'm afraid it will be very difficult and uncomfortable.'

'But she would have you and Frances to help her,' said Lady Myrtle. 'At least—no, dear Jacinth, you really must not anticipate troubles that may never, that I trust will never come.'

Then she hesitated and stopped short, and seemed to be thinking deeply.

'My dearest child,' she said at last, 'you are very young, and I have a great dread of forgetting how young you are. I have too, as you know, a very great respect for parental authority. I would never take upon myself to interfere in any real way with your life, unless I had your father and mother's approval. But this I may say, so far as I can possibly influence them and the whole circumstances, you may rely upon it that this nightmare of Barmettle shall never be anything but a nightmare. Though at the same time I am most strongly of opinion that your father must not return to India.'

'Oh, thank you, dear Lady Myrtle, thank you a thousand times for what you say,' said Jacinth.

'It is your father's health I am thinking of too,' said the old lady. 'Your aunt feels sure that it is time for him to come home for good. He has been out there so long, and he is not a young man. He is a good deal older than your mother.'

'Yes,' Jacinth replied. 'He is fifteen years older; and mamma has always been wonderfully strong. But even for her it would be much nicer to come home now. Seventeen years is a long time, and only one year and one six-months at home! Oh, I do feel so much happier since you have spoken so to me—even though it makes me rather frightened about papa. It would be terrible for his health to fail.'

'We must make him take it in time,' said Lady Myrtle cheerfully. 'I don't think there is any cause for immediate anxiety. Yes—nothing is sadder than when the head of a house breaks down prematurely.'

Her words, following upon her own, struck Jacinth curiously. What was it they made her think of? What family had she been hearing of whose father was in bad health? Ah—yes, it was these Harpers! How tiresome it was that they seemed always to be 'turning up,' as Jacinth expressed it to herself! There were scores and scores of other families in as bad trouble as they; the world was full of such cases.

'If Frances had been here,' thought Jacinth, 'she would have been certain to begin about them and their father—only annoying Lady Myrtle and doing no good. Not but that I'm very sorry for them. I hope their father is better, I'm sure.'

Alas! these two or three months had not passed so quickly or so brightly in the—no, I must not say in the Harpers' pleasant though plain old house at Southcliff, for Hedge End was let, and the three girls were living in Mrs Newing's tiny rooms in Harbour Street—the rooms where Camilla had declared they would be so cosy and comfortable, enjoying a rest from all housekeeping cares.

And as far as the material details of their life was concerned they would have been more than content, though it was a new experience to them to be even temporarily without a home; and now and then Camilla and Bessie grew a little anxious about Margaret, and wondered if they were taking as good care of her as mother would have done. For the little girl looked very pale and delicate sometimes, and her appetite was fitful.

'I wonder if it is Mrs Newing's cooking,' said Camilla to her confidante, Bessie. 'At home we could always get some nice little thing; mother is so clever in that way, with father having been so long ill. But here it would be impossible to try to cook anything ourselves.'

'And whatever we do, we mustn't worry mother about Margaret,' said Bessie. 'Mother needs all the cheering possible to keep up her spirits, with dear father being so suffering still. Oh, Camilla, I wonder if we shall soon have better news?'

Things had not improved, even to the limited extent which was all that Captain Harper had counted upon, as rapidly as the former time that he had been an inmate of the private hospital for three months. He was weaker than then, and perhaps his intense anxiety to benefit by the effort that had in every sense cost them all so dear, was against him.

The doctors, so wrote Mrs Harper to her elder girls, now spoke of three months more, not as desirable but as a necessity. And how it was to be managed she could not see. Furthermore, to give a chance of anything approaching cure, or rather lasting improvement, the regulation visit to the German baths must, they now declared, be followed up by a winter in a mild, dry climate.

'Of this,' said the mother, 'we are not even thinking. The three more months here are all we can contemplate, and I dare not tell your father how impossible even that seems. It is out of the question, as he is, to move him to an ordinary hospital where I could not be with him. I believe if we did so he would give up the struggle and quietly resign himself to leaving us.'

'Camilla, he must stay,' said Bessie. 'There is one thing, these people do want to keep on the house longer?'

'For two months—not three,' said Camilla, 'and we have not yet given them a decided answer.'

'Then let us take it upon ourselves to decide,' said Bessie. 'And we will write and tell mother that is settled. And what else can we do, Camilla? Father must stay as long as the doctors think necessary. It is the middle of March now; he has been there two months. I suppose he should stay till the middle or end of July.'

'And then go abroad,' said Camilla.

'Ah well, we scarcely can hope for that. But I think, Camilla, you should write to Aunt Flora: father will never do it, and mother would not without his leave. But we can. Ask her to lend us some money, whatever is strictly necessary, and tell her that somehow we will repay her. She is very generous, and she would never forgive us if we let father lose the last chance, for want of anything she could do.'

'But she has so little ready money,' said Camilla. 'I don't know if they are bad managers, for they have a good income, but it all seems to go.'

'Father says they cannot help it. Uncle Lyle has so much to keep up out there—entertaining and all sorts of things,' said Bessie. 'But I am sure they would manage to lend us—how much?—fifty or a hundred pounds? And Camilla, we will repay it. Can we not save a little on our living? I suppose we couldn't do with a room less; it would not be wholesome for Margaret. And for her sake too we must not attempt still plainer food.'

'No,' said Camilla, 'I fear that is impossible. You see Margaret is so quick. She would notice in a moment if you and I eat less or at all differently from her. But—yes, perhaps the time has come when we must apply definitely to Aunt Flora. I will write by the next mail.'

'And Camilla, if we tide over this present trouble,' said Bessie, 'I think you or I must do something—something to earn money by. I am too young to be a governess yet, but I know—she almost said it to me—that Miss Scarlett would take me even now as a sort of pupil-teacher, and two years hence I think I might be a governess—to young children.'

'It may have to be,' the elder sister agreed. 'But the question is which of us should go. I could be a governess already, but then that stops your and Margaret's education. And, Bessie, it would be rather additionally trying to father and mother—father especially—for you to be in that kind of position at Thetford, the very part of the country our family comes from. And so near to Robin Redbreast too.'

Bessie reared her head. 'I don't mind that,' she said. 'I should rather like it the better.'

'But father?' said Camilla gently. And brave Bessie was silent.

The letter to Mrs Lyle was written and sent. It reached her in her new Indian quarters about ten days before Mrs Mildmay started on her return home.

It was May; the charming capricious month we dream of all the year round, always believing—thanks to poets and childish remembrances rose-coloured by the lapse of time—that if the weather is cold and gray and generally disappointing this year, it is quite an exception and never has been so before: it was May before the day came on which Lady Myrtle Goodacre's landau set off in state for Thetford railway station, with Jacinth, Frances, and Eugene already occupying it, and a vacant seat for Miss Alison Mildmay whom they were to call for on the way.

Frances and even Eugene were almost speechless with excitement: Jacinth, though wound up to a tremendous pitch, was too proud and too self-contained by habit to show what she was feeling.

'Lady Myrtle hopes you will come back with us, Aunt Alison,' she said quietly, 'at least to spend the rest of the day, as you wouldn't consent to come to stay for two or three.'

Miss Mildmay, before replying, glanced at her niece with a curious sort of admiration, not altogether free from disappointment.

'Jacinth certainly is extraordinarily self-controlled,' she thought. Very self-controlled, like very reserved people do not always entirely appreciate their own characteristics in another! But aloud she replied much in the same matter-of-fact tone.

'It is very good of her, but I would rather find my own way home from the station. I will come out to Robin Redbreast to-morrow or the day after to have a talk with your mother. She will have more than enough to occupy her to-day.'

Jacinth secretly commended her aunt's good sense, but the younger ones seemed a little sorry. They wanted everybody to be as happy as themselves.

'It isn't that you don't think there'd be room enough in the carriage, Aunt Alison, is it?' said Frances, anxiously. 'For the closed wagonette is coming too for mamma's maid and the luggage, and I wouldn't mind the least bit getting into it.'

'Or I could go on the box,' suggested Eugene. 'I could quite squeeze in between Bailey and Fred, and I'm sure they wouldn't mind.'

'Thank you, dears,' said Miss Mildmay, more warmly than she had spoken to Jacinth; 'thank you very much. No; it is not on that account. And indeed there is plenty of room in here for Eugene extra. But I shall enjoy more, coming to-morrow or the day after, and then you must all spare me your mother for an hour or so.'

The train was late of course. There was that strange odd bit of time we all know so well—of waiting and expectancy, intensified of course in the present case by the fact that the mother they were about to meet was literally a stranger to the three children. Even Jacinth was a good deal paler than her wont, when at last the train slowly steamed into the station and drew up beside the platform where they were standing.

Would she have known her mother, she asked herself afterwards? Scarcely; there were several passengers who might have been the one. She felt almost bewildered when Aunt Alison turned from all, to hurry forward to greet a slight, girlish-looking figure—girlish in herself, though not in attire or bearing—who was gazing about her with eager eyes.

'Eugenia.'

'Alison,' and the two sisters-in-law had caught each other's hands and kissed each other before Jacinth had really taken in that this was 'mamma!'

Then Miss Mildmay drew back without another word than 'Here they are! I did want to give them over to you, myself, you see,' and her usually calm voice trembled a little.

And Jacinth felt an arm thrown round her, and the words whispered into her ear, 'My darling child!' and for almost the first time in her life a choking sensation that was not pain, and a rush to her eyes of tears that were not sorrow, made her dimly conscious that she knew her own nature and its depths less fully than she had imagined.

And then in turn she fell back a little while the two younger ones, with a glad cry from Francie of 'Mamma, mamma!' and a solemn 'It's me; I'm Eugene,' from the small brother, were drawn close, close, by the arms that had not held them for so long, and kissed as they never remembered having been kissed before.

And somehow—I don't think any of them could ever clearly have told how; perhaps Mrs Mildmay's maid had a head on her shoulders and was equal to the occasion—they all found themselves in the landau again; all, that is to say, except Aunt Alison, who stood waving good-bye to them all from the curbstone, her face for once actually rosy with excitement.

'Mamma!' said Frances, and then she stopped short. 'It's too lovely, I can't speak.'

Eugene was stroking his mother's mantle. It was of soft downy material, rich in colour and texture.

'How pretty!' he said.

Jacinth glanced at it and the rest of her mother's attire, and at her mother herself. She felt proud of her, of her undeniable beauty and air of distinction—proud to present her to Lady Myrtle—and yet——

'I wonder if mamma is very much taken up with her clothes,' she thought. 'I wonder if she is extravagant. I expect I shall have to take a good deal upon me, as Lady Myrtle said. I suppose people in India really grow very unpractical.'

Poor Lady Myrtle! Little had she intended her words to be thus travestied.

But the reflection was not disagreeable to Jacinth, to whom a position of responsibility and management was always congenial. She took her mother's hand in hers, and smiling at Eugene replied: 'Yes indeed. What lovely fur trimming, mamma! And what a pretty bonnet! You couldn't have had that in India, surely?'

'No,' said Mrs Mildmay, smiling back at her children, 'I got one or two things in London yesterday. I thought you would like me to look nice, especially as I was going straight to Robin Redbreast. I don't believe poor dear Aunt Alison would have seen any difference if I had come back in the same clothes I went away in all those years ago.'

'No,' agreed Frances, 'I don't believe she would.'

But Jacinth looked a little grave; she could not quite 'make out' her mother.

'Aunt Alison spends almost nothing on herself,' she said. 'She gives away every farthing she possibly can.'

'I know she does, dear. She is the most self-denying person in those ways that I have ever met,' said Mrs Mildmay heartily, though mentally hoping to herself that Jacinth was not very matter-of-fact. But Eugene was looking very solemn.

'What are you thinking of, my boy? his mother asked.

'Those clothes,' he said, 'those clothes what you went away with. They must be wored out. I was only two when you went away, mamma?'

This made them all laugh, which was perhaps a good thing—a slight relief to the over-excitement which in their different ways all had been experiencing.

'Mamma,' said Frances earnestly, when the laughter had calmed down, 'I must tell you, I had no idea you were so pretty. I think you are the very prettiest person I ever saw.'

'So do I,' Eugene chimed in.

Mrs Mildmay could not resist kissing again the two sweet flushed faces.

'My darlings,' she said, 'I hope you will always think so, in one way, even when my hair is white and my face old and wrinkled.'

'I hope,' thought Jacinth to herself, 'I hope mamma isn't—not vain, it's such a contemptible word—but I hope she doesn't care too much for looks and outside things of that kind.'

But the very defining her thoughts startled her. She knew she had no right to begin criticising her mother in this way, and she pulled herself up.

'Mamma,' she said, and her tone was both perfectly natural and simple, and more unconstrained than Mrs Mildmay had yet heard it—'mamma, isn't it really delightful, and isn't it almost wonderful that we should be all staying with Lady Myrtle and taking you to her? Isn't it really like a fairy story?'

'It is indeed,' said Mrs Mildmay. 'It is wonderful. The way that she seemed to start up just when—so soon after we had lost dear granny, and in a sense our home.'

'It would have been lovely, of course, for you to come back to us anyway,' said Frances, 'but it wouldn't have been so lovely if we'd all been going to Aunt Alison's. It's rather a poky place, you know, mamma, and in India I suppose the houses are all enormous. I can only remember like in a dream, about very big, very white rooms.'

'The last house we've had was far from enormous,' said her mother with a smile, 'still it was very nice. I often wished you and Jassie could have been with us there.'

'But—oh mamma, you'll never go back again,' pleaded Frances. 'We've got dear papa's coming to look forward to now, and after that—never mind where we live, if only we stay together.'

Mrs Mildmay smiled, though for the first time with a touch of sadness.

'Don't let us spoil to-day by looking forward, dear; except, as you say, to your father's coming. If he were here, everything would seem perfect.'

'And here's Robin Redbreast,' exclaimed Jacinth, as they turned the corner of the lane, 'and "Uncle Marmy's gates" wide open in your honour. Generally we drive in at the side. Now, mamma, take a good look. First impressions are everything, you know. Isn't this perfect?'

She seemed full of enthusiasm, which her mother was glad to see and quick to respond to.

'It is beautiful: I have never seen anything like it,' she replied warmly. 'And could there have been a more exquisite day?'

'And mamma, mamma,' cried Eugene, 'you know, don't you, it was all me that got friends with Lady Myrtle; me, with getting—wursty, that day, you know?'