"I am an automaton? Good! Let me alone, then," said Rose, speaking from a corner where she was sitting on the carpet at the foot of a bookcase, with a volume spread open on her knee.—"Miss Helstone, how do you do?" she added, directing a brief glance to the person addressed, and then again casting down her gray, remarkable eyes on the book and returning to the study of its pages.
Caroline stole a quiet gaze towards her, dwelling on her young, absorbed countenance, and observing a certain unconscious movement of the mouth as she read—a movement full of character. Caroline had tact, and she had fine instinct. She felt that Rose Yorke was a peculiar child—one of the unique; she knew how to treat her. Approaching quietly, she knelt on the carpet at her side, and looked over her little shoulder at her book. It was a romance of Mrs. Radcliffe's—"The Italian."
Caroline read on with her, making no remark. Presently Rose showed her the attention of asking, ere she turned the leaf, "Are you ready?"
Caroline only nodded.
"Do you like it?" inquired Rose ere long.
"Long since, when I read it as a child, I was wonderfully taken with it."
"Why?"
"It seemed to open with such promise—such foreboding of a most strange tale to be unfolded."
"And in reading it you feel as if you were far away from England—really in Italy—under another sort of sky—that blue sky of the south which travellers describe."
"You are sensible of that, Rose?"