A Granted Prayer

“I don’t understand it,” poor Lucy Merrick used to say to her aunts, as they “talked the boys over” in the quiet Hillbridge drawing-room, with its sad-coloured walls hung with photographs after Benozzo Gozzoli and Burne-Jones. “I shall never understand why, with all their opportunities, all three of the poor dear boys should be such failures. Of course one doesn’t love them any the less—” It was not set in Lucy Merrick’s heart to love anyone less; the only difference she knew how to make was to love more. “Of course not,” the eldest Miss Arkell acquiesced. The Misses Arkell were Professor Merrick’s step-sisters, the offspring of his mother’s first marriage, but they embraced his views with an ardour that consanguinity does not always ensure. The second sister, Miss Candace Arkell (in that household the three syllables were insisted on) made a faint sound of dissent. She was even more zealous than her sister in her adhesion to Professor Merrick’s doctrines, and proportionately less disposed to condone his sons’ defection. “I cannot agree that one does not love them any the less,” she said firmly. “Armstrong, especially, with his talent for drawing—I remember, when he was a tiny boy, how he used to ask me to tell him the stories of the Burne-Jones pictures.”