“He wrote you quite a happy letter; and I don’t really think you could help him by going there and bringing the whole thing up again,” said Lucian.
“It’s so very hard to do nothing.”
“The hardest thing there is,” agreed the doctor gravely.
She looked at him anxiously.
“Poor little Cecil,” said Henrietta. “Don’t you think he’s probably learnt his lesson, Rose, if the other boys have found him out in some trick or other, and have been horrid to him? If you go down there, it’ll make it all assume enormous proportions to him, and, after all, even Mr. and Mrs. Lambert aren’t supposed to know about it officially, as she said in her letter.”
“Then I’d better not go?” Rose repeated slowly, as though she could hardly believe in the necessity for the discipline, so alien to her, of inaction.
“I should think, better not.”
Rose, from indignation at the suggestion, passed to unwilling consideration of it, and still more unwilling conversion to it.
But she made up her mind, at last, that Cecil should be allowed to weather the storm alone.
It was perhaps the first time that she had deliberately denied herself the luxury of acting upon impulse.