There came a little tap at the door at this unfortunate juncture, and I wiped my eyes fiercely.
“Is anybody in,” asked a sweet-tuned voice that I had never heard before.
“It must be aunt Kate,” I said to myself, and I rose reluctantly to admit her.
Aunt Kate was my godmother, and my father’s favourite sister. She had been in the habit of sending little presents to me on my birthday, and otherwise showing an interest in my existence, and it seemed quite natural that she should seek me in this affectionate haste. But it was not aunt Kate. It was a youthful little creature, with soft hazel eyes and a tender pale face, dressed in the severest grey homespun, with only big pearl buttons to trim it, and a little grey bonnet, with a white border peeping out under it upon her smooth brown hair.
“I heard you were in, cousin Kitty,” the sweet voice said, “so I have come to call upon you. I am Eleanor Armytage, and I am so glad you are come home to us at last!”
Here she lifted her small arms and clasped my neck to kiss me, whereat I—the last person in the world to be sentimental with strangers—hugged her fervently, and then burst into violent weeping. This is how I made the acquaintance of the best and dearest of all my English cousins, sitting beside her on a low sofa at the foot of the bed, with my head on her shoulder, and my hand clasped in her lap, like a weak-minded school-girl. I cannot describe the delicacy of her sympathy, and her delicate ways of expressing it, with so much self-possession and such an entire absence of “gush,” and yet with such a flutter of emotion about her, and such an evident sound of tears in her voice. In my own rash and headlong way, I lost my heart to her there and then. But I only indulged in what, for me, was an extraordinary weakness for a very few seconds, and then I sat bolt upright and abused myself roundly.
“No, I am not a bit tired, and I do not feel strange—people are too kind to me for that; I’m just a great baby, and I’m ashamed of myself,” I said, scrubbing my wet eyes angrily. “Pray don’t think I’m such a donkey in the ordinary way, cousin Eleanor. To think of my receiving you for the first time by falling on your neck and weeping, like a born idiot!”
“Don’t call yourself any more names, Kitty,” broke in Eleanor, with a rather hysterical laugh. “I’m sure I understand it. I know it just happens—just once in a way—when you are thinking of things that even if a dog comes and looks at you it upsets you somehow, when an army of soldiers wouldn’t do it.”
When she said that—so true as it was—I thought of my dear old Spring, and how he used to come and look at me if anything was the matter. I could see his great, soft, wistful eyes, as he laid his nose on my knee, and held his feathery tail poised ready to wag the moment he was satisfied that things were not so bad as he had feared, and found himself at liberty to offer consolation. He would never come and look at me any more! He would stray away to Narraporwidgee, and hunt about for his lost mistress; and Tom would go in search of him, and the two would sadly wander back again, heavy-footed and heavy-hearted under the sense of loss and loneliness that weighed them down. I buried my face in the sofa cushions, and broke into such a passion of crying as I had never indulged in since I parted from them. This time I could not get over it so easily. Eleanor let me alone—that is to say, she went down on her knees beside me, and coaxed my head with her small pale cheek and her small warm hand, and she kept silence while I had it out. I blessed her for her delicate forbearance, and began to think better of girls from that moment, for her sake.
This was the worst fall I ever had in my daily contest with memory, set always in battle array against me, though I was subject to periodical reverses. And Eleanor Armytage became in a manner identified with my inner life thenceforth, though even to her I did not confide so much as the name of my sweetheart, or the bare fact that I had one. We had not “things in common;” we were as unlike one another as two girls of the same age, belonging to the same class, could well be; but in this earliest hour of our acquaintance we inaugurated a true and tender friendship that will certainly last our lives. Neither of us knew what it was to say one thing and mean another; we could never take one another in; we were incapable of that amiable, half-unconscious, and, in the main, well-meaning hypocrisy, which, though it makes many fervent friendships, destroys the most of them, sooner or later; we trusted one another with the completest trust, even when our mutual relations were the least agreeable, and occasionally they were not as pleasant as they might have been. And these I take it, are the essential conditions of any friendship that is worthy of the name.