‘I ought to have known better than to have shown it to you! You are always laughing at her and me all over the house—and now—’
‘Come, Dolly. I never meant to hurt your feelings. I will promise not to tell the others about it.’
No answer. There was something hard and swelling in Dolores’s throat.
‘Won’t that do?’ said Gillian. ‘You know I can’t say that I admire it, but I’m sorry I hurt you, and I’ll take care the others don’t tease you about it.’
Dolores made hardly any answer, but it was a sort of pacification, and Gillian said not a word to the younger ones. Still she thought it no breach of her promise, when they were all gone to bed, and she the sole survivor, to tell her mother how inadvertently she had affronted Dolores by cutting up the verses, before she knew whose they were.
‘I am sorry,’ said Lady Merrifield. ‘Anything that tends to keep Dolores aloof from us is a pity.’
‘But, mama, I had no notion whose they were.’
‘You saw that she was pleased with them.’
‘Yes, but that was the more ridiculous. Fancy the evening star climbing up—up—you know in the sunset!’
‘Portentous, certainly! Yet still I wish you could have found it in your heart to take advantage of any feeler towards sympathy.’