“I wish she could leave home for a time.”
But Flora, when this was suggested to her, said that she did not wish to leave home. Her manner implied that the suggestion hurt her.
At first the Canon was pleased, assuring Lucilla that the pleasant home-life at St. Gwenllian, even if robbed of its old-time joyousness, would best restore Flora to herself. But after a time, he, too, watched her with anxiety.
“Little Flora is not herself,” he began to say.
“Let me send for the doctor, Father,” Lucilla urged.
“We will see, my dear, later on. The unsettled weather is trying to us all just now—no doubt things will right themselves in a day or two, and we shall smile at our own foolish, faithless fears.”
Meanwhile, however, no one at St. Gwenllian evinced any desire to smile at anything, and Flora became subject to violent fits of crying.
Her dignity and her delicate reticence seemed alike to have deserted her. She cried in church, and sometimes she cried at home, regardless of the presence of her father and sister.
“My dear, what is it?” the Canon enquired at last, long after Lucilla had given up asking the same question in despair.
“Nothing,” said Flora.