The Raymounts could not afford one of the most expensive lodgings in Burcliff, but were content with a floor in an old house in an unfashionable part of town, looking across the red roofs of the port and out over the flocks of Neptune’s white sheep on the blue-gray German ocean. It was kept by two old maids whose hearts had been flattened under the pressure of poverty—no, I am wrong. Our Lord never mentions poverty as one of the obstructions to his kingdom. It was anxiety over their poverty that caused the sisters Witherspin to wear away their lives in scraping together provision for an old age they were destined never to see.

They were a small, meager pair with hardly a smile between them. One waited and the other cooked. The one that waited had generally her chin tied up with a silk handkerchief, as if she had come to life again, but not quite, and could not do without the handkerchief. The other was rarely seen, but her existence was all day testified by the odours that ascended from the kitchen of her ever-recurrent labours. It was a marvel how from a region of such fumes could ascend the good dinners she provided.

Hester’s heart was full of compassion for them. It looked as if God had forgotten them—toiling for so little all day long, but the fact was they had forgotten God. They should have sought the kingdom of heaven, and trusted him for their future while they did their work with might. Instead, they exhausted their spiritual resources by sending out armies of ravens, with hardly a dove among them, to find and secure a future still submerged in the waves of a friendly deluge. Nor was Hester’s own faith in God so vital yet as to propagate itself in the minds of those she knew. She could only be compassionate and kind.

The morning after the visit to the aquarium, woeful Miss Witherspin, as Mark had epitheted her, entered to remove the ruins of breakfast with a more sad and injured expression of countenance than usual. It was a glorious day, and she was like a live shadow in the sunshine. Most of the Raymounts were already in the open air, and Hester was the only one in the room. The small, round-shouldered, cadaverous creature went moving about the table with a motion that suggested bed as fitter than labour, though she was strong enough to get through her work without more than occasional suffering. If she could only have left pitying herself and let God love her she would have got on well enough.

Hester, who had her own share of the same kind of fault, was rather moodily trimming her mother’s bonnet with a new ribbon, glancing up from which she at once perceived that something in particular must have exceeded in wrongness the general wrongness of things in the poor little gnome’s world. Her appearance was usually that of one with a headache. Her expression this morning suggested a mild indeed but all-pervading toothache.