Chapter Three.

Plans for the Future.

Mrs Fortescue was full of curiosity.

The girls were absolutely silent. She talked with animation of their usually gay programme for Christmas. The Blundells and the Arbuthnots and the Aylmers had all invited them to Christmas parties. Of course they would go. They were to dine with the Arbuthnots on the following evening. She hoped the girls had pretty dresses.

“There will be quite a big party,” said Mrs Fortescue. “Major Reid and his son are also to be there. Michael Reid is a remarkably clever man. What sort of dresses have you, girls? Those white ones you wore last summer must be rather outré now. It was such a pity that I was not able to get you some really stylish frocks from Madame Aidée in town.”

“Our white frocks will do very well indeed,” said Florence.

“But you have grown, dear; you have grown up now,” said Mrs Fortescue. “Oh my love!” She drew her chair a little closer to the young girl as she spoke. “I wonder what Mr Timmins meant. He did not seem at all interested in my house. I expressed so plainly my willingness to give it up and to take a house in town where we could be all happy together; but he was very huffy and disagreeable. It was a sad pity that you didn’t stay in for him. It put him out. I never knew that Mr Timmins was such an irascible old gentleman before.”

“He is not; he is a perfect dear,” said Florence.

“Well, Florence, I assure you he was not at all a dear to me. Still, if he made himself agreeable to you, you two darling young creatures, I must not mind. I suppose I shan’t see a great deal of you in the future. I shall miss you, my loves.”

Tears came into the little woman’s eyes. They were genuine tears, of sorrow for herself but also of affection for the girls. She would, of course, like to make money by them, but she also regarded them as belonging to her. She had known them for so long, and, notwithstanding the fact that she had been paid for their support, she had been really good to them. She had given them of those things which money cannot buy, had sat up with Florence night after night when she was ill with the measles, and had read herself hoarse in order to keep that difficult young lady in bed when she wanted to be up and playing about.

Of the two girls Florence was her darling. She dreamed much of Florence’s future, of the husband she would win, of the position she would attain, and of the advantage which she, Mrs Fortescue, would derive from her young friends—advancement in the social scale. Beauty was better than talent; and Florence, as well as being an heiress, was also a beauty.

It cannot be said that the girls did much justice to Bridget’s hot cakes. They were both a little stunned, and their one desire was to get away to their own bedroom to talk over their changed circumstances, and decide on what course of action they would pursue with regard to Mrs Fortescue. In her heart of hearts, Florence would have liked to rush to the good lady and say impulsively—

“I am a cheat, an impostor. I haven’t a penny in the world. You will be paid up to the end of the Christmas holidays, and then you will never see me any more. I have got to provide my own living somehow. I suppose I’ll manage best as a nursery governess; but I don’t know anything really well.”

Brenda, however, would not encourage any such lawless action.

“We won’t say a word about it,” said Brenda, “until after Christmas Day.”

She gave forth this mandate when the girls were in their room preparing for dinner.

“Oh,” said Florence; “it will kill me to keep it a secret for so long!”

“It won’t kill you,” replied Brenda, “for you will have me to talk it over with.”

“But she’ll go on asking us questions,” said Florence. “She will want to know where we are going after the holidays; if we are going to stay on with her, or what is to happen; and unless we tell her a lot of lies, I don’t see how we are to escape telling her the truth. It is all dreadful from first to last; but I think having to keep it a secret from Mrs Fortescue is about the most terrible part of all.”

“It is the part you feel most at the present time,” said Brenda. “It is a merciful dispensation that we cannot realise everything that is happening just at the moment it happens. It is only by degrees that we get to realise the full extent of our calamities.”

“I suppose it is a calamity,” said Florence, opening her bright eyes very wide. “Somehow, at the present moment I don’t feel anything at all about it except rather excited; and there are eighty pounds left. Eighty pounds ought to go far, oughtn’t they? Oughtn’t they to go far, Brenda?”

“No,” said Brenda; “they won’t go far at all.”

“But I can’t make out why. We could go into small lodgings and live quite by ourselves and lead the simple life. There is so much written now about the simple life. I have read many books lately in which very clever men say that we eat far too much, and that, after all, what we really need is abundance of fresh air and so many hours for sleep and very plain food. I was reading a book not long ago which described a man who had exactly twenty pounds on which he intended to live for a whole year. He paid two and sixpence a week for his room and about as much more for his food, and he was very healthy and very happy. Now, if we did the same sort of thing, we could live both of us quite comfortably for two years on our eighty pounds.”

“And then,” said Brenda, “what would happen at the end of that time?”

“Oh, I should be married by then,” said Florence, “and you would come and live with me, of course, you old darling.”

“No; that I wouldn’t,” said Brenda. “I am not at all content to sit down and wait. I want to do something. As far as I am concerned, I am rather glad of this chance. I never did care for what are so-called ‘society pleasures.’ I see now the reason why I always felt driven to work very hard. You know father was a great writer.