The only thing she had perhaps really learnt was to recite Gray’s “Elegy,” and even Miss Montague gave her credit for being able to do that.
The school lives of Maggie and Deborah afterwards became fairly calm. Marion also was reconciled to the inevitable, chiefly no doubt because one of the clergymen sent his son to the same school soon afterwards, and upon that there followed a doctor’s daughter. This girl made great friends with Maggie and Deborah, and the friendship lasted for a good many years. But she at least was strong enough to keep to the rule of never speaking to any other girls but as inferiors.
When she first came her mother had expressly forbidden that she should be caned; consequently the other girls detested, even hated her.
Deborah out of school soon forgot all about all this. She never formed any friendships except with those girls who distinctly put themselves out of the way to approach her, and these naturally were very few.
There were two things only that made up her world. One was love for her father, and the other, love of a world created out of involuntary dreams.
Together with her love for her father went a strong religious tendency; she had a great belief in the goodness of God and the love of Christ.
Instinctively Deborah felt the cloud that was hanging over them, yet could not account for it.
For the first two years after leaving the country her father had answered various advertisements, and gone personally in search of situations, but nothing ever came of them. Then came a third year, one of the dullest and gloomiest that could be imagined. There was very little to live on, and only those who have had to live on nothing and yet appear as if they lived on something can fully understand its miseries.
Perhaps the saddest and most miserable thing of all was to see the farmer in his best black coat. It had grown very brown and old and out of fashion, and because he had grown thinner it seemed rather to hang on him. There had been a time in the country when he regularly went to church in it night and morning, for he had been a churchwarden nearly twenty years. But now he never went to church at all. He read the Bible at home some times instead. You see he had no top hat; the one that formerly shone so well and looked so smooth was now shabby and old, and how could a man who had regularly gone to church in a silk hat for twenty years and was now growing old ever accustom himself to go there in anything inferior?
Besides, he had no money, and once when Deborah, with a child’s pointedness, had asked him why he never went to church now, he replied,—