"——And that the night has induced you to see your situation in its proper light."
"You speak as though I were the under house-maid," says Lilian with a faint sense of humor. "And yet the word suits me. Surely there never yet was a situation as mine. I wish my horrid cousin had been drowned in——. No, Aunt Priscilla, the night has not reformed me. On the contrary, it has demoralized me, through a dream. I dreamt I went to Chetwoode, and, lo! the very first night I slept beneath its roof the ceiling in my room gave way, and, falling, crushed me to fine powder. After such a ghastly warning do you still advise me to pack up and be off? If you do," says Lilian, solemnly, "my blood be on your head."
"Dreams go by contraries," quotes Miss Priscilla, sententiously. "I don't believe in them. Besides, from all I have heard of the Chetwoodes they are far too well regulated a family to have anything amiss with their ceilings."
"Oh, how you do add fuel to the fire that is consuming me!" exclaims Lilian, with a groan. "A well-regulated family!—what can be more awful? Ever since I have been old enough to reason I have looked with righteous horror upon a well-regulated family. Aunt Priscilla, if you don't change your tune I vow and protest I shall decide upon remaining here until my cousin takes me by the shoulders and places me upon the gravel outside."
"I thought, Lilian," says her aunt, severely, "you promised me yesterday to think seriously of what I have now been saying to you for a whole week without cessation."
"Well, so I am thinking," with a sigh. "It is the amount of thinking I have been doing for a whole week without cessation that is gradually turning my hair gray."
"It would be all very well," says Miss Priscilla, impatiently, "if I could remain with you; but I cannot. I must return to my duties." These duties consisted of persecuting poor little children every Sunday by compelling them to attend her Scriptural class (so she called it) and answer such questions from the Old Testament as would have driven any experienced divinity student out of his mind; and on week-days of causing much sorrow (and more bad language) to be disseminated among the women of the district by reason of her lectures on their dirt. "And your cousin is in London, and naturally will wish to take possession in person."
"How I wish poor papa had left the Park to me!" says Lilian, discontentedly, and somewhat irrelevantly.
"My dear child, I have explained to you at least a dozen times that such a gift was not in his power. It goes—that is, the Park,—to a male heir, and——"
"Yes, I know," petulantly. "Well, then I wish it had been in his power to leave it to me."