“How splendid!” said Miss Forster, with loud conviction, her tone and manner leaving no room for doubt that she was paying a tribute to something other than the inspiration of the oil-stove.
Lydia smiled again, and went upstairs.
The other boarders were going upstairs too, and as Lydia turned the corner of the higher flights that led to her own room, she could hear them on the landing below.
“I do think that girl’s behaving most splendidly!”
Miss Forster’s emphatic superlatives were unmistakable.
“She looks like a sort of queen to-night,” said an awed voice, that Lydia recognized with surprise as belonging to the usually inarticulate Hector Bulteel.
She had not missed her effect, then.
Lydia did not write that evening. She went to bed almost at once, glad of the darkness, and feeling strangely tired. After she was in bed she even found, to her own surprise, that she was shedding tears that she could not altogether check at will.
Then, after all, she minded?
Lydia could not analyze her own emotion, and as the strain of the day relaxed, she quietly cried herself to sleep like a child.