'Say yes, Milly.'
Three short words, and yet they went straight to Milly's heart. It was only the postscript of a long, sorrowful letter—the finale brief but eloquent—of a quiet, dispassionate appeal; but it sounded to Mildred Lambert much as the Macedonian cry must have sounded of old: 'Come over and help us.'
Mildred's soft, womanly nature was capable of only one response to such a demand. Assent was more than probable, and bordered on certainty, even before the letter was laid aside, and while her cheek was yet paling at the thought of new responsibilities and the vast unknown, wherein duty must tread on the heel of inclination, and life must press out thought and the worn-out furrows of intro- and retrospection.
And so it was that the page of a negative existence was turned; and Mildred agreed to become the inmate of her brother's home.
'Aunt Milly!' How pleasant it would be to hear that again, and to be in the centre of warm young life and breathless activity, after the torpor of long waiting and watching, and the hush and the blank and the drawn-out pain, intense yet scarcely felt, of the last seven years.
To begin life in its fulness at eight-and-twenty; to taste of its real sweets and bitters, after it had offered to her nothing but the pale brackish flavour of regret for a passing youth and wasted powers, responsive rather than suggestive (if there be such monstrous anomaly on the whole face of God's creation), nothing being wasted, and all pronounced good, that comes direct from the Divine Hand. To follow fresh tracks when the record of the years had left nothing but the traces of the chariot-wheels of daily monotonous duties that dragged heavily, when summer and winter and seed-time and harvest found Mildred still through those seven revolving courses of seasons within the walls of that quiet sickroom.
It is given to some women to look back on these long level blanks of life; on mysteries of waiting, that intervene between youth and work, when the world's noise comes dimly to them, like the tumult of city's streets through closed shutters; when pain and hardship seem preferable to their death-in-life, and they long to prove the armour that has grown rusted with disuse.
How many a volume could be written, and with profit, on the watchers as well as the workers of life, on the bystanders as well as the sufferers. 'Patient hearts their pain to see.' Well has this thought been embodied in the words of a nineteenth-century Christian poet; while to many a pallid malcontent, wearied with inaction and panting for strife, might the Divine words still be applied: 'Could ye not have watched with Me one hour?'
Mildred Lambert's life for eight-and-twenty years might be summed up in a few sentences. A happy youth, scarcely clouded by the remembrance of a dead father and the graves of the sisters that came between her infancy and the maturer age of her only brother; and then the blurred brightness when Arnold, who had married before he had taken orders, became the hard-working vicar of a remote Westmorland parish—and he and his wife and children passed out of Milly's daily life.
