But it was not in this way alone that Podmore was a good friend to Madam Liberality.

She took her out walking, and let her play on the beach, and even bring home dirty weeds and shells.  Indeed, Podmore herself was not above collecting cowries in a pill-box for her little nephews.

When Mrs. Podmore met acquaintances on the beach, Madam Liberality played alone, and these were her happiest moments.  She played amongst the rotting, weed-grown stakes of an old pier, and “fancied” rooms among them—­suites of rooms in which she would lodge her brothers and sister if they came to visit her, and where—­with cockle-shells for teacups, and lava for vegetables, and fucus-pods for fish—­they should find themselves as much enchanted as Beauty in the palace of the Beast.

Again and again she “fancied” Darling into her shore-palace, the delights of which should only be marred by the growls which she herself would utter from time to time from behind the stakes, in the character of a sea-beast, and which should but enhance the moment when she would rush out and throw her arms round Darling’s neck and reveal herself as Madam Liberality.

“Darling” was the pet name of Madam Liberality’s sister—­her only sister, on whom she lavished the intensest affection of a heart which was always a large one in proportion to her little body.  It seemed so strange to play at any game of fancies without Darling, that Madam Liberality could hardly realize it.

She might be preparing by herself a larger treat than usual for the others; but it was incredible that no one would come after all, and that Darling would never see the palace on the beach, and the state-rooms, and the limpets, and the seaweed, and the salt-water soup, and the real fish (a small dab discarded from a herring-net) which Madam Liberality had got for her.

Her mind was filled with day-dreams of Darling’s coming, and of how she would display to her all the wonders of the seashore, which would reflect almost as much credit upon her as if she had invented razor-shells and crabs.  She thought so much about it that she began quite to expect it.

Was it not natural that her godmother should see that she must be lonely, and ask Darling to come and be with her?  Perhaps the old lady had already done so, and the visit was to be a surprise.  Madam Liberality could quite imagine doing a nice thing like this herself, and she hoped it so strongly that she almost came to believe in it.

Every day she waited hopefully, first for the post, and then for the time when the coach came in, the hour at which she herself had arrived; but the coach brought no Darling, and the post brought no letter to say that she was coming, and Madam Liberality’s hopes were disappointed.

Madam Liberality was accustomed to disappointment.

From her earliest years it had been a family joke that poor Madam
Liberality was always in ill-luck’s way.