Deborah went out to the dining-room to change the table cloth for one of the best damasks, saying to herself, “It’s just as it ought to be!  Just as it ought to be!  And things do happen so once in a while in this crooked world.”

XXV.

THE WILL OF GOD.

“To see in all things good and fair,
Thy love attested is my prayer.”—­Alice Cary.

“Linnet is happy enough,” said their mother; “but there’s Marjorie!”

Yes; there was Marjorie!  She was not happy enough.  She was twenty-one this summer, and not many events had stirred her uneventful life since we left her the night of Miss Prudence’s marriage.  She came home the next day bringing Mrs. Kemlo with her, and the same day she began to take the old household steps.  She had been away but a year, and had not fallen out of the old ways as Linnet had in her three years of study; and she had not come home to be married as Linnet had; she came home to do the next thing, and the next thing had even been something for her father and mother, or Morris’ mother.

Annie Grey went immediately, upon the homecoming of the daughter of the house, to Middlefield to learn dressmaking, boarding with Linnet and “working her board.”  Linnet was lonely at night; she began to feel lonely as dusk came on; and the arrangement of board for one and pleasant companionship for the other, was satisfactory to both.  Not that there was very much for Annie to do, beside staying at home Monday mornings to help with the washing, and ironing Monday evening or early Tuesday.  Linnet loved her housekeeping too well to let any other fingers intermeddle.  Will decided that she must stay, for company, especially through the winter nights, if he had to pay her board.

Therefore Marjorie took the place that she left vacant in the farmhouse, and more than filled it, but she did not love housekeeping for its own comfortable sake, as Linnet did; she did it as “by God’s law.”

Her father’s health failed signally this first summer.  He was weakened by several hemorrhages, and became nervous and unfitted even to superintend the work of the “hired man.”  That general superintendence fell to Mrs. West, and she took no little pride in the flourishing state of the few acres.  Now she could farm as she wanted to; Graham had not always listened to her.  The next summer he died.  That was the summer Marjorie was twenty.  The chief business of the nursing fell to Marjorie; her mother was rather too energetic for the comfort of the sickroom, and there was always so much to be attended to outside that quiet chamber.

“Marjorie knows her father’s way,” Mrs. West apologized to Mrs. Kemlo.  “He never has to tell her what he wants; but I have to make him explain.  There are born nurses, and I’m not one of them.  I’ll keep things running outside, and that’s for his comfort.  He is as satisfied as though he were about himself.  If one of us must be down, he knows that he’d better be the one.”