When she was gone Sigrid returned to the room with dancing eyes.
“Is she not delightful!” she cried. “For myself, Frithiof, I can’t hesitate for a moment. The work will be easy, and she will be thoroughly kind.”
“Because no sweet-tempered woman ever had such a straight, thin-lipped mouth.”
“I think you are very horrid to pick holes in her when she has been so kind to us. For myself I must accept. But how about Swanhild?”
“I hate the thought for either of you,” said Frithiof moodily.
Somehow, though his own descent in the social scale had been disagreeable enough, yet it had not been so intolerable to him as this thought of work for his sisters.
“Now, Frithiof, don’t go and be a goose about it,” said Sigrid caressingly. “If we are ever to have a nice, cosy little home together we must certainly work at something, and we are not likely to get lighter, or more congenial, or better-paid work than this. Come, dear, you have got, as Lance would say, to ‘grin and bear it.’”
“In any case, we must give Swanhild herself a voice in the matter,” he said at length. “Accept the offer if you like, provisionally, and let us write to her and tell her about it.”
“Very well, we will write a joint letter and give her all sorts of guardianly advice. But, all the same, you know as well as I do that Swanhild will not hesitate for a moment. She is dying to come to England, and she is never so happy as when she is dancing.”
Frithiof thought of that day long ago, when he had come home after meeting the Morgans at the Bergen landing quay, and had heard Sigrid playing as he walked up the garden path, and had found Swanhild dancing so merrily with Lillo, and the old refrain that had haunted him then returned to him now in bitter mockery:
“To-day is just a day to my mind; All sunny before and sunny behind, Over the heather.”
When Roy came home that evening the matter was practically decided. Frithiof and Sigrid had had a long talk in the library with Mr. and Mrs. Boniface, and by and by in the garden Sigrid told him gleefully what she called the “good news.”
“I can afford to laugh now at my aluminium pencils and the embroidery patterns, and the poodle shaving,” she said gayly. “Was it not lucky that we happened to go to Mrs. Horner’s party, and that everything happened just as it did?”