"There does seem to have been a deficiency," muttered the Judge, and having appeased himself with this bit of internal malice, he turned an attentive ear to the end of her speech.
"His mother you know, was a commonish sort of person"
Here Salina, who stood upon the broad door-step with the front door open, strode down and confronted Mrs. Farnham. She remained thus with those little grey eyes searching the lady's face, and with her long, bony hand tightly clenched, as if she waited for something else before her wrath would be permitted to reach the fighting point. But Mrs. Farnham remained silent, only muttering over "a very commonish sort of person indeed," and with hound-like reluctance, Salina retreated backward, step by step, to her position at the door.
CHAPTER XXVII.
NEW PEOPLE AND NEW HOMES
There was energy and strength in her,
A heart to will, with a hand to do;
Like the fruit that lies in a chestnut bur
That honest soul was fresh and true.
Meantime Mary Fuller and Isabel had remained in the carriage, locked in each others arms, murmuring out their fondness and their grief, with promises of faithful remembrance amid broken sob; and tears, such as they had never shed before, even in their first poverty stricken orphanage.
Something of that deep, unconscious spirit of prophecy, which sometimes haunts the souls of children God-loving like Mary Fuller, whispered her that this separation would be for years. She had reasoned with this presentiment all the way from the Alms House, which had so lately been their home, to this the place of their future residence. In the innocence of her heart she had taxed this feeling as a selfish one, and had covered herself with self-reproach, for having fallen into envy of the brighter destiny which awaited Isabel, in comparison with her own prospects. But the child had done herself injustice, and mistook the holiest intuition of a pure heart for a feeling of which that heart was incapable.
Isabel merely knew that they were to be parted, that the young creature whose care had been that of a mother, whose patience and gentle love had given a home feeling even to the Alms House, would no longer share her room, curl her hair, and arrange her dress with kindly devotion, or in any way soothe her life as she had done.
She did not comprehend, as Mary did, the great evil which this separation would bring upon her moral nature; but her affectionate heart was touched, and the passionate grief that she felt at parting, was more violent by far than the deeper and more solemn feeling that shook Mary's heart to the centre, but made no violent outcry, as lighter grief might have done.