It was a happy day when Christina found herself in the library. It was the only room that nearly always had a fire, and she had been passing the door when the housemaid was going in to light it.
"Is this Mrs. Hallam's room?" asked the child innocently.
And Emily, the housemaid, had laughed at her.
"Come in and see it. 'Tis your father's wish that it should always be kept well aired. He does set store on his books so! Mr. Tipton says 'tis most vallyble library, and 'tis to keep the books from getting damp we have so many fires."
So Christina had stolen shyly in, and looked with awe and wonder at the treasures it contained. And then from awe she passed to wistful longing, and when Nurse one day said lightly, "If you're a good girl and put every book back where you find it, you can read them," she had joyfully taken advantage of this permission, and had made the library her retreat whenever Nurse was "called away on business" from the nursery.
The books in the library proved an inexhaustible pleasure to the little maiden. There were old books and new books; books with pictures, books without. An illustrated series of Froissart's "Chronicles" kept her entranced for two months, and now, on this particular day, she had seized an old "History of France" and had been following, with breathless interest, the fortunes and fate of Jeanne d'Arc.
She shut her book up with a little shiver when she read of the heroine's shameful death. And there, upon the hearthrug, she was doing what she always did after reading about any heroine of fiction: transferring herself—Christina, aged eight—into the circumstances and position of the heroine.
"And it might have been me!"
Christina had a very big conception of what ought to be done, and a very tremulous and small opinion of her own courage.
Slaughter of any kind was abhorrent to her. The death of a fly on a window pane, a mouse in a trap, or a bird in the garden, was the occasion for a flood of tears and much lamentation. Now she murmured to herself: