He turned sharply away, muttering, ‘She is coming to bother, now!’
It cut her to the heart. ‘Gilbert!’ was all she could exclaim, but the tone of pain made him look at her, as if in spite of himself, and as he saw the tears he exclaimed in an impatient voice of rude consolation, ‘There’s nothing to take so much to heart. No one thinks anything of it!’
‘What would Edmund have thought?’ said Albinia; but the appeal came too soon, he made an angry gesture and said, ‘He was nearly three years younger than I am now! He would not have been kept in these abominable leading-strings.’
She was too much shocked to find an answer, and Gilbert went on, ‘Watched and examined wherever I go—not a minute to myself—nothing but lessons at Tremblam, and bother at home; driven about hither and thither, and not allowed a friend of my own, nor to do one single thing! There’s no standing it, and I won’t!’
‘I am very sorry,’ said Albinia, struggling with choking tears. ‘It has been my great wish to make things pleasant to you. I hope I have not teased or driven you to—’
‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Gilbert, disrespectfully indeed, but from the bottom of his heart, and breaking at once into a flood of tears. ‘You are the only creature that has been kind to me since I lost my mother and Ned, and now they have been and turned you against me too;’ and he sobbed violently.
‘I don’t know what you mean, Gilbert. If I stand in your mother’s place, I can’t be turned against you, any more than she could,’ and she stroked his brow, which she found so throbbing as to account for his paleness. ‘You can grieve and hurt me, but you can’t prevent me from feeling for you, nor for your dear father’s grief.’
He declared that people at home knew nothing about boys, and made an uproar about nothing.
‘Do you call falsehood nothing?’
‘Falsehood! A mere trifle now and then, when I am driven to it by being kept so strictly.’