Now all these plans of hers must be knocked on the head! She tried to be thankful that if she failed to secure satisfactory help during the coming month, then the holidays would at least give her leisure to do her own housework for awhile. She had accustomed herself to remember that, as Jeremy Taylor tells us, every trial has two handles, or at least that we have two hands, and that, when anything happens to our displeasure, it is the part of a wise and submissive spirit to handle it on that side in which we can find some comfort or use. But it seemed to poor Lucy as if this “handle” was so slight that it was ready to break in her trembling grasp. She knew that trials which loom large in the mists of our own minds are sometimes wonderfully reduced in magnitude if we can get them outside ourselves, and state them in plain terms. So she tried to rally her courage and spirits by asking what was this trouble, after all? She was simply parting from a servant whom she had never liked, and who had proved herself to be a girl of low type. That was how Lucy resolutely put it, and then it seemed little enough. She would not let herself add that she was already worn out under the awful anxiety of her husband’s illness, the strain of the separation, the practical solitude, the unremitting duties which would allow of no rest nor recreation. She left these in her sub-consciousness. When we know that no hand but ours is on the helm, we can face anything except the full realisation that we ourselves are stunned and reeling in the storm. It seemed to Lucy that as she and Miss Latimer were not to have their holiday together at the seaside, the next best thing would be to invite Miss Latimer to spend her holiday in the little house with the verandah, so that they might at least enjoy each other’s society. Miss Latimer accepted the invitation eagerly, adding the information that she had got to leave the house in which she had been living, as the family were quitting town. “Come and stay with me, then, till you are comfortably suited elsewhere,” Lucy wrote back in reply. “I wish I could ask you to stay till Charlie returns. But it would give you too long a journey to your pupils.” Miss Latimer’s answer soon came. “I gladly accept your invitation in its new extended form,” she said. “I wish we could be together in this London which can make separation so easy. I should not mind the length of the daily journey to my pupil, but my income is too small to bear deduction of a railway fare.”