Often she felt like refusing the responsibility altogether.  After all, her step-mother was a woman quite old enough to manage her own affairs.  If she wished to foolishly imperil her health why need Esther care?  Why indeed?  But this train of reasoning never lasted long.  Always there came a counter-question, “If you do not care, who will?” And the dearth of any answer settled the burden more firmly upon her rebellious shoulders.  For one thing there was always the inner knowledge that Mary Coombe was weak and that she, Esther, was strong.  She had always known this.  Even when her father had brought home his pretty bride and Esther, a shy, silent child of eleven, had welcomed her, she had known that the newcomer was the weaker spirit.  The bride had known it too.  She had never attempted to control Esther, leaving the child entirely to her father—­a bit of unwitting wisdom which did much to smooth daily life at the Elms.  If the doctor saw his wife’s weakness of character it is probable that it did not interfere with his love for her.  Why need she be strong while he was strong enough for two?  But he had forgotten one thing—­the day when she would have to be strong alone!

The realisation came to him upon his death-bed.  Esther was sure of this.  He could not speak, but she had read the message of his eyes, the appeal to the strength in her to help the other’s weakness.  No getting away from the solemn charge of that entreating look!

* * * * *

Esther was thinking of that look now, as she sat alone in the dusk of the veranda.  Tea was over and Aunt Amy was putting Jane to bed.  From her mother she had had no word.  Blank silence had met her when she had taken the tea tray upstairs and called softly through the closed door.  Mrs. Coombe was probably asleep.  She would be better to-morrow; but before long she would be ill again, and the interval between the attacks was becoming shorter.

There was anger as well as anxiety in the girl’s mind.  Her healthy and straightforward youth had little patience with her step-mother’s unreasonable caprices.  For her illness she had every sympathy, but for the morbid nervousness which seemed to accompany it, none at all.  These constant headaches, the increasing nervous irritability from which Mrs. Coombe suffered lay like a shadow over the house.  Yet the sufferer refused to take the obvious way of relief and persisted in her refusal with a stubbornness of which no one would have dreamed her light nature capable.  Still, willing or unwilling, something must be done.  Aunt Amy, too, was becoming more of an anxiety.  Once or twice lately she had spoken of “Them,” a sign of mental distress which Dr. Coombe had always treated with the utmost seriousness.  Perhaps if a doctor were called in for Aunt Amy, Mrs. Coombe would lose her foolish dread of doctors and allow him to prescribe for her also.  And if the new doctor were half as clever as Mrs. Sykes said he was—­Esther’s