"You have allowed her studies to prey upon her health," said General Harrington, seating himself and fixing his cold, clear eyes on the face of his questioner. "I must hereafter more directly superintend her education in person. You will have the goodness to inform Mrs. Harrington of this sudden indisposition."
Agnes changed color. The self-poise of this old man of the world, baffled even her eager curiosity. She had expected that he would desire her to keep the whole scene secret; and when he quietly told her to reveal it to his wife, and took a resenting tone, as if she had herself been the person in fault, her astonishment was extreme. The General saw his advantage, and improved upon it. After softly folding the skirts of his dressing-gown over his knees, and smoothing the silk with his palm, he took up a volume from the table, and adjusted the gold glasses to his eyes with more than usual deliberation. Agnes looked at him steadily, baffled, but not deceived, till his thoughts seemed completely buried in the volume. As she gazed, the evil of her half-smothered passion broke out in her glance; and, as the General languidly raised his eyes from the book, they met hers.
"Is there anything you wait for?" he inquired, meeting that fierce gaze with his cold eyes. "Ah, I had forgotten, my people may drive the carriage round—please say as much."
Agnes left the room, biting her lips till they glowed again, and with her hand clenched in impatient fury. As she closed the door, General Harrington laid down his book with an impatient gesture.
CHAPTER XXX.
BROTHER AND SISTER.
Lina could not rest. She went to her room, but it seemed so changed, so unlike her old home, that a terror, that was almost insanity, fell upon her. The rich blue curtains, to her excited mind, looked sombre against their underwaves of frost-like lace, and her bed, with its snowy canopy, now overclouded with damask, had a deadly whiteness about it, that made her shrink within herself, as if some leprosy had fallen upon her, which forbade her ever again to approach a thing so pure.
Lina crept into this room sad and disheartened; looking wearily around, she cowered down on the carpet in the farthest corner, and sat watching the door, as if she expected some enemy to come in and drive her forth. At the least sound in the hall she would start and shrink back with a moan upon her white lips, but she shed no tears, and her look was rather one of affright than of the intense grief which had overpowered her while in the presence of General Harrington.
At that moment there was a hurried tread upon the staircase. Every pulse in Lina's heart throbbed wildly, and she sat leaning eagerly forward with a half-expectant, half-frightened air, as the steps paused before her door. A low, quick knock caused her to start from the floor. She looked wildly round, as if seeking some means of escape, then sunk against the wall, while her whole frame trembled with agitation. The knock was repeated, and she covered her face with her hands, uttering a low, shuddering moan. A third time that impatient summons shook her form as with a convulsion, and when a voice, whose lightest tone possessed the power to move her inmost soul, reached her ear in an eager whisper, she rose again and stood upright, transfixed by that voice, which had never before met her ear without filling her whole being with gentle pleasure.
"Lina—Lina—are you there?"