He led the way, and she followed very willingly. Placing her in a chair before the fire, he drew another to the rug; and seating himself, said just as if speaking to Louisa—
"What have you been doing these two months? What is it that clouds your face, my little sister?"
"Ah, sir! I am so weary of that school. You don't know what a relief it is to come here."
"It is rather natural that you should feel home-sick. It is a fierce ordeal for a child like you to be thrust so far from home."
"I am not home-sick now, I believe. I have in some degree become accustomed to the separation from my father; but I am growing so different from what I used to be; so different from what I expected. It grieves me to know that I am changing for the worse; but, somehow, I can't help it. I make good resolutions in the morning before I leave my room, and by noon I manage to break all of them. The girls try me and I lose my patience. When I am at home nothing of this kind ever troubles me."
"Miss Irene, yours is not a clinging, dependent disposition; if I have rightly understood your character, you have never been accustomed to lean upon others. After relying on yourself so long, why yield to mistrust now? With years should grow the power, the determination, to do the work you find laid out for you."
"It is precisely because I know how very poorly I have managed myself thus far that I have no confidence in my own powers for future emergencies. Either I have lived alone too long, or else not long enough; I rather think the last. If they had only suffered me to act as I wished, I should have been so much better at home. Oh, sir, I am not the girl I was eight months ago. I knew how it would be when they sent me here."
"Some portentous cloud seems lowering over your future. What is it? You ought to be a gleeful girl, full of happy hopes."
She sank farther back in her chair to escape his searching gaze and drooped her face lower.
"Yes, yes; I know I ought, but people can't always shut their eyes."