"Why does he work so late?" asked Lesley, innocently. "I should have thought the day-time was pleasanter."
Miss Brooke gave a short, explosive laugh, fixed a pair of eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose, and looked at Lesley as if she were a natural curiosity.
"Have you yet to learn," she said, "that we don't do what is pleasant in this life, but what we must?"
Then she got up and went away from the breakfast-table, leaving Lesley ashamed and confounded. The girl leaned her elbows upon the white cloth, and furtively wiped a tear away from her eyes. She found herself in a new atmosphere, and it did not seem to her a very congenial one. She was bewildered; it did not appear possible that she could live for a year in a home of this very peculiar kind. To her uncultivated imagination, Mr. Brooke and his sister looked to her like barbarians. She did not understand their ways at all.
She spent the morning in unpacking her things, and arranging them, with rather a sad heart, in her room. She did not like to go downstairs until the luncheon-bell rang; and then she found that she was to lunch alone. Miss Brooke was out; Mr. Brooke was in his study.
The white-capped and severe-visaged middle-aged servant, who was known as Sarah, came to Lesley after the meal with a message.
"Mr. Brooke says, Miss, that he would like to see you in his study, if you can spare him a few minutes."
Lesley flushed hotly as she was shown into the smoky, little den. It was a scene of confusion, such as she had never beheld before. The table was heaped high with papers: books and maps strewed every chair: even the floor was littered with bulky tomes and piles of manuscript. At a knee-hole table Caspar Brooke was sitting, writing hard, as if for dear life, his loose hair falling heavily over his big forehead, his left hand grasping his thick brown beard. He looked up as Lesley entered, and gave her a nod.
"Good-morning," he said. "Wait a minute: I must finish this and send it off by the quarter to three post. I have just done."
He went on writing, and Lesley stood motionless beside the table, with a feeling of dire offence in her proud young heart. Why had he sent for her if he did not want her? She was half inclined to walk away without another word. Only a sense of filial duty restrained her. She thought to herself that she had never been treated so unceremoniously—even in her earliest days at school. And she was surprised to find that so small a thing could ruffle her so much. She had hardly known at the convent, or while visiting her mother, that she had such a thing as a "temper." It suddenly