She was glad that Alison was absent, and Rose in the garden. She laid her head on her little table, and drew long sobs of keen suffering, the reaction from the enjoyment and hope of the last few months. And so little knew she what she ought to ask, that she could only strive to say, “Thy will be done.”
“Ermine! my Ermine, this is not a thing to be so much taken to heart. This foolish philosopher has not even read his letters. I never saw any one more consistently like himself.”
Ermine looked up, and Colin was standing over her, muffled up to the eyes, and a letter of his own in his hand. Her first impulse was to cry out against his imprudence, glad as she was to see him. “My cough is nearly gone,” he said, unwinding his wrappings, “and I could not stay at home after this wonderful letter—three pages about chemical analysis, which he does me the honour to think I can understand, two of commissions for villainous compounds, and one of protestations that ‘I will be drowned; nobody shall help me.’”
Ermine’s laugh had come, even amid her tears, his tone was so great a relief to her. She did not know that he had spent some minutes in cooling down his vexation, lest he should speak ungently of her brother’s indifference. “Poor Edward,” she said, “you don’t mean that this is all the reply you have?”
“See for yourself,” and he pointed to the divisions of the letter he had described. “There is all he vouchsafes to his own proper affairs. You see he misapprehends the whole; indeed, I don’t believe he has even read our letters.”
“We often thought he did not attend to all we wrote,” said Ermine. “It is very disheartening!”
“Nay, Ermine, you disheartened with the end in view!”
“There are certainly the letters about Maddox’s committal still to reach him, but who knows if they will have more effect! Oh, Colin, this was such a hope that—perhaps I have dwelt too much upon it!”
“It is such a hope,” he repeated. “There is no reason for laying it aside, because Edward is his old self.”
“Colin! you still think so?”