going to school; just what some
girls wouldn't have liked. I've always wanted so to have some
companions, only it isn't half as much good having them if you only see
them at lessons. I don't think Miss Jacinth minds. She was pleased to go
to school because of learning better and finding out how much other
girls know compared with us, but I don't think she minds the way I do.'

She had almost forgotten whom she was speaking to, or indeed that she
was speaking aloud, and half started when Phebe replied again to this
long speech.

'It's just because of that, Miss Frances,' said the girl, 'that I was
thinking how nice it will be if you're invited sometimes to play with
the young ladies of a holiday afternoon like to-day. And if I were you,
I'd take care to show Miss Mildmay that it doesn't unsettle you, and I'd
just put out of my mind about having any young ladies to come to you.
It'd not suit your aunt's ways.'

'No,' said Frances, 'I suppose not. It's only really the Harpers I care
about,' she added to herself. 'And now,' she went on thinking, 'with
this muddle about the old lady at Robin Redbreast--if their mother
doesn't want her to know about them, perhaps it's best for Jacinth not
to see them much. And I'll have to forget what Margaret told me, after
I've written to mamma. I want to remember it _exactly_ to tell her.'

She sighed a little. Almost for the first time Frances began to realise
that, even when one is possessed of the purest motives and the best
intentions, life may be a complicated business. Right and wrong are not
always written up before us on conspicuous finger-posts, as we fancy in
childhood will be the case. There are shades and modifications, wisdom
and unwisdom; apparently, though, thank God, only 'apparently,'
conflicting duties, whose rival claims it is not always easy to measure.
And it is not till some stages later in our journey that we come to see
how our own prejudices or shortsightedness or self-will are really at
the root of the perplexity. For God demands no impossibilities. As has
been quaintly said, 'He neither expects us to be in two places at once,
nor to put twenty-five hours' work into twenty-four.'

To do what is the least agreeable to us, though far from an invariable
rule, is often a safe one. Frances would have liked to run up-stairs to
the nursery, and to sit down there and then to the long letter to
'mamma,' to the outpouring of confidence to the almost unknown friend
she