So she went to her usual labour, and worked at it as she had worked for years; but other schools were rising in Fendie, where the little daughters of the masons and joiners and seamen of the good town could acquire a greater stock of accomplishments than Helen professed--where the fancy-work flourished in a perfect luxuriance of patterns, and the sober “whiteseam,” which was poor Helen’s staple, was thrust aside in disgrace. Helen was so foolish as to have an opinion on this subject; she had a good deal of wilfulness about her, it must be confessed; she thought it an honourable craft for those small maidens of hers, the manufacture of garments for their various homes; but was somewhat impatient of the tawdry prettinesses after which their ambition yearned. It did her a little harm this weakness of aesthetical feeling; she thought of the natural fitness and propriety, and they gave her no thanks; and so it chanced that Helen got few new scholars. She felt the evils of competition; as her elder girls dropped off with their quota of education completed, younger ones did not come in to fill up the declining numbers, even when the young schoolmistress having discovered her error began not very willingly to amend it. Mrs Buchanan was beginning to look very sad and careworn; the steps of the coming wolf were already at the door. The half year’s rent would soon be due, and the mother and daughter, in their anxious consultations, could by no means see where it was to come from. And the banker Oswald was their landlord; the gentle widow and the proud, sensitive Helen were at one in that point; there was nothing that they would not rather do than delay their payment by a single day. Mrs Buchanan’s little portion was very attenuated now; the expenses of her husband’s illness and death had nearly swallowed it up, and the remnant was in the form of bank shares; but the very meagre dividend which this little capital yielded yearly was not above half what was necessary for this dreaded rent. The good mother painfully hoarded the little stock of school-fees; painfully expended what was absolutely needed--and lay awake far into the night and started again before the sun was up, calculating that sad arithmetic which could not issue in anything but a failure--laboriously trying to bring together the two ends which would not meet. So Helen needed the natural spring and buoyant life of her temperament as much as Lilias did the gentle human touch of hope: their sorrows were apportioned to them by the same Hand which did so diversely create their spirits. Lilias had been very patient, until this wild light of hope broke in upon her still dead sorrow; and now Helen was bravely fighting against the cold incoming tide of neglect and poverty; holding up a high heart above the waves, and keeping as she could, unwetted by the chill spray about her, the wings of her strong life.