But when Sylvia coaxingly uttered, “My own dear duck of a K,” and the soft warm arm squeezed her, and the eyes would have been weeping, and the tongue reproaching in another moment, she allowed it to go on—it was so precious and sweet to be loved; and she told Sylvia she was a star in the dark night.
No one ever found out those, and one or two other, instances of small disobedience. They were not mischievous, Josephine willingly overlooked them, and there was nothing to bring them to light. It would have been better for Sylvia if her faults had been of a sort that brought attention on them more easily!
Meanwhile, Lady Barbara had almost found in her a model child—except for her foolish shy silence before her elders, before whom she always whispered—and freely let the girls be constantly together. The aunt little knew that this meek well-behaved maiden was giving the first warp to that upright truth that had been the one sterling point of Kate’s character!
CHAPTER X.
It had been intended that Mrs. Lacy should rejoin her pupil at Bournemouth at the end of six weeks; but in her stead came a letter saying that she was unwell, and begging for a fortnight’s grace. At the fortnight’s end came another letter; to which Lady Barbara answered that all was going on so well, that there was no need to think of returning till they should all meet in London on the 1st of October.
But before that 1st, poor Mrs. Lacy wrote again, with great regret and many excuses for the inconvenience she was causing. Her son and her doctor had insisted on her resigning her situation at once; and they would not even allow her to go back until her place could be supplied.
“Poor thing!” said Lady Jane. “I always thought it was too much for her. I wish we could have made her more comfortable: it would have been such a thing for her!”
“So it would,” answered Lady Barbara, “if she had had to do with any other child. A little consideration or discretion, such as might have been expected from a girl of eleven years old towards a person in her circumstances, would have made her happy, and enabled her to assist her son. But I have given up expecting feeling from Katharine.”
That speech made Kate swell with anger at her aunt’s tone and in her anger she forgot to repent of having been really thoughtless and almost unkind, or to recollect how differently her own gentle Sylvia at home would have behaved to the poor lady. She liked the notion of novelty, and hoped for a new governess as kind and bright as Miss Oswald.
Moreover, she was delighted to find that Mrs. George Wardour was going to live in London for the present, that Alice might be under doctors, and Sylvia under masters. Kate cared little for the why, but was excessively delighted with plans for meeting, hopes of walks, talks, and tea-drinkings together; promises that the other dear Sylvia should come to meet her; and above all, an invitation to spend Sylvia Joanna’s birthday with her on the 21st of October, and go all together either to the Zoological Gardens or to the British Museum, according to the weather.