"Mamma must have been very tired," she thought, soberly; and realized that, far from dreading her mother's absence in that dingy, dreary house, she was almost glad of it. When one is as tired as Mrs. Darcy, rest is the great boon--rest from hopeless hoping, rest from making homes out of patience and courage and a few old sticks of furniture, rest from the anxious sorrow of loving.
Joan was young to understand such things; but at her birth the fairies had given her the cruel gift of seeing out of the eyes of others....
She came to the conclusion at last the thing she had been dreading was simply responsibility. Her play-time was over. No stretch of imagination could make her a little girl again--not with her hair well up on her head and a love-letter crackling deliciously under her pillow! Hereafter it was hers to create the home her mother had relinquished; hers to make ends meet somehow, if only in the accepted Irish way of "cutting a piece off one end and tying it onto the other"; hers to keep out of her father's eyes a certain baffled, hunted look which Joan associated with men who came to collect bills, referred to grimly by Ellen as "the Indians." No family of pioneers on the long-ago western frontier ever lived in greater fear of Indians than did Richard and Mary Darcy and their child Joan.
The girl sighed, bracing her slight shoulders. But still thinking of her mother, she rehearsed sleepily one tenet of the little creed she had made long since to fit her necessities:
Friends of Mary Darcy, in the distant days before they forgot to discuss her surprising marriage with a promoter from who knows where, were wont to say, "At least he makes a devoted husband and father!"
Which was perfectly true. His little family had always been, as he often said, a passion with Richard Darcy. Perhaps his facility in saying things of the sort was what had appealed in the first place to the shy, undemonstrative Northernness of Mary. Though he was one of several who had professed their willingness to live for her, he was the only suitor who had offered to die for her--an attention she could not but appreciate.
It was entirely for his child's sake (and, indeed, at some personal risk to himself, had Mary but suspected it) that two years before Major Darcy had so arranged the mysterious affairs he called Business as to be able to return to the State and city of his illustrious birth; "where," he explained with proud humility, "we are not quite nobodies, my darling!"