Joan was happy in her husband's happiness; she was happy in her unstinted housekeeping; she was now particularly happy in Denas' school. The little lads and lasses brought all their news, all their joys and sorrows to Denas; and when Denas went home every day, Joan, with her knitting in her hands, was waiting to give her a dainty meal and to chat with her over all she had heard and all she had done.
And Denas was happy. When she mentally contrasted this busy, loving winter with the sorrows of the previous one, with the hunger and cold and poverty, the anguish of death and the loneliness, she could not but be grateful for the little home-harbour which her storm-tossed heart had found again. If she had a regret, it was that she could not retain her hold upon her finished life. Every time she asked her heart after Roland, memory gave her pictures in fainter and fainter and fainter colours. Roland was drifting farther and farther away.
She could no longer weep at his name. A gentle melancholy, a half-sacred remoteness invested the years in which he had been the light of her life. For
"When the lamp is shattered, The light in the dust lies dead; When the cloud is scattered, The rainbow's glory is fled."
Mercifully, youth has this marvellous elasticity. And the children filled all the vacant places in her life. For as yet she did not think much nor at all decidedly about Tris. If Roland was slipping away from memory, Tris by no means filled her heart. Yet she was pleased when Ann Trewillow's little maid Gillian told her one morning:
"Master Arundel's yacht be come into harbour safe and sound, and Captain Tris, he be brave and hearty, and busy all to get ashore again. And my mother do say Mr. Arundel he be going to marry a fine lady, and great doings at the Abbey, no doubt. And mother do say, too, that Captain Tris will be marrying you. And I was a brave bit frightened at that news, and I up and answered mother: 'It bean't so. Miss Denas likes better teaching us boys and girls.' I said that, and wishing it so with all my heart."
And Denas, seeing that the boys and girls were looking anxiously at her for an assurance of this position, said positively:
"I am happier with you, children, than I could be with anyone else, and I do not intend to marry at all."