"I have nobody coming and you can have your protégée to yourself. I am old enough now to like to retire to my room, and have a thorough good sleep between lunch and tea."
So Louise came over. She was bright and animated, and overjoyed to see Anstice again.
"I never can thank you enough for getting me out of that hole. I think I should have gone melancholy mad had I stayed there much longer."
"I thought you might have come back to your uncle at Christmas time," said Anstice; "did you get holidays?"
"Oh yes, but winter in the Fells—at Ramdale! It is so awful! I went down to Bournemouth with my friend and thoroughly enjoyed it. How is my uncle? Do you know?"
"I wondered if you ever thought about him," said Anstice. "He is one of the pleasant surprises in the Fells. An unselfish old man who gives up his young niece for her good, and exchanges her bright society for a sad, weary, elderly person not his equal in birth, and therefore hardly a companion for him."
"I was never bright," said Louise with a shamed face; "I grumbled and glowered all the time. But I will go back at Easter, and in the summer, if he will have me; and I will try to be nice to him. Then I shall see you again, I hope."
She chatted on then about her work, and Anstice listened and sympathized. Lady Lucy appeared for tea, and then Anstice carried off Louise to evening church, to hear a noted preacher near there.
She had rather a nice little talk with her on the way home; Louise told her that she went to a very nice church at Hampstead.
"The Vicar there really makes me think, as you say your parson at Butterdale does you. I have never forgotten what you said to me and the verse you quoted, about not knowing Christ though He had been with us all our lives. And the principal of the school, Miss Jarrett, is what would be called a real earnest Christian, so you see I am being pulled towards heaven in several different ways."