"Well, if you have anything of a voice, you will soon do better than that. Any one can sing hymns."
Lucy made no reply, but she privately thought that very few could sing them like her Aunt Mary. Then, recollecting that Stella had told her how well Sophy played and sang, she turned rather timidly to her with the request, "Won't you sing, Cousin Sophy?"
"Do, Sophy," added her mother and Stella, both at once.
But Sophy, reclining in a luxurious easy-chair near the fire, and absorbed in a sensational novel, was too comfortable to think of moving.
"I really can't just now," she said rather coldly. "I'm tired, and I'm just at the most interesting place in this book."
"Sophy never will sing to please any one but herself and—some people," said Stella mischievously. "And then, sometimes, if she takes the notion, there's no stopping her. Now, if a certain person I know were here—"
Ada laughed. Sophy just said haughtily, "I'll be much obliged to you, Stella, not to disturb me;" at which Stella, with mock gravity, put her finger on her lip.
"Well, I am tired," Mrs. Brooke at last said, rising; "and I am sure Lucy must be so too. Lucy, I advise you to go to bed at once; and, Stella, don't stay in your cousin's room talking, and don't wake Amy, if she is asleep."
It seemed very strange to Lucy that the family circle should break up for the night without the united acknowledgment of the protecting kindness which had carried them in safety through the day—without invoking the same protecting care through the watches of the night—without the acknowledgment of the sins of the day, and the prayer for forgiveness, and the petitions for dear absent ones—to which she had always been accustomed. It was plain that no custom of the kind existed in Mr. Brooke's family.
Notwithstanding her mother's prohibition, Stella did linger long in Lucy's room, chattering about one thing after another, Amy's wide-open eyes watching them from her pillow. "I'm going just in a minute," she would say, when Lucy reminded her of what her mother had said, and then she would rush into some new subject. Lucy was tired, and was longing to have a little quiet time to herself; but Stella, who was undressing beside her, and would be in bed and asleep as soon as she should go back to her own room, did not consider that.