Their Chancery money was a chimera, and none of them throughout their lives had more than a few pounds at a time, but their wishes were more or less granted. Edmund crossed the sea many times and saw four out of the five continents; Laura had her house full of books, if not actually in a wood, with a wood somewhere handy; and their poor mother, towards the end of her life, got her modest thirty shillings a week, for that was the exact sum to which the Canadian Government made up her small income when granting her her Mother’s Pension. The memory of that wish gave an added bitterness to the tears she shed for the first few years when the monthly cheque arrived.

But all that was far in the future on those winter evenings when they sat in the firelight, the two children on little stools at their mother’s feet, while she knitted their socks and told them stories or sang. They had had their evening meal and their father’s plate stood over a saucepan of water on the hob, keeping warm. Laura loved to watch the warm light flickering on the walls, lighting up one thing after another and casting dark shadows, including their own, more than life-size and excitingly grotesque.

Edmund joined in the chorus of such things as “There is a Tavern” and “Little Brown Jug” but Laura refrained, by special request, for she had no ear for music and they said her singing put them out of tune. But she loved to watch the firelight shadows and to hear her mother’s voice singing to sweet melancholy airs of a pale host of fair maidens who pined and faded for love. There was “Lily Lyle, Sweet Lily Lyle,” which began:

‘Twas a still, calm night and the moon’s pale light

Shone over hill and dale

When friends mute with grief stood around the deathbed

Of their loved, lost Lily Lyle.

Heart as pure as forest lily,

Never knowing guile,

Had its home within the bosom

Of sweet Lily Lyle.

Sometimes the children would talk about what they would do when they were grown up. Their future had already been mapped out for them. Edmund was to be apprenticed to a trade—a carpenter’s, their mother thought; it was cleaner work than that of a mason and carpenters did not drink in public-houses as masons did, and people respected them more.