The strangeness of her surroundings, and the strangeness of her position generally, filled her with a kind of excitement. She had not very much in front of her of a pleasurable nature, and yet the morrow had for her a certain glamour.
As the first sensation of alarm and indignation provoked naturally by the treatment she had received, by the abruptness with which her life of dependence had been ended, died away, Caroline became conscious that there was an undoubted charm about her present situation. A day before, the future (when she had thought about it) had stretched before her in a grey, a monotonous, an almost desolate fashion. Now all things were possible, and hope began almost immediately to shed a glow on her thoughts.
It was an amazingly delightful sensation to feel that she owned no master.
Indeed, she felt a little irritated now with herself that she should have supported so much with such an unquestioning docility, or that having given so much obedience she should never have tried to satisfy herself why this should have been exacted.
At school, of course, it had been the outcome of rules, of a régime which had existed ever since she could remember, but when the school life had ended, and she had gone to Mrs. Baynhurst, there really had been no occasion, so she told herself now, to have accepted the laws laid down for her with the same old obedience.
"Only she really never gave me the chance to speak," the girl mused to herself, "and then I was such a little idiot when I first met her that she frightened me! I expect she will be furious because I went to Mr. Haverford. Now that I have seen him and spoken with him, it is easy enough to understand why his mother prefers to see him only on rare occasions. He has a blunt, straightforward way about him which must be an abomination to her. He was not too amiable to me. Still, I must do him justice," Caroline admitted here readily; "he saw at once that I had a sort of claim on him, and duty with him evidently counts for a good deal."
She turned comfortably on the soft pillow.
It was her first experience of a really luxurious bed, for she had been better housed and better fed at school than as a dependant in Mrs. Baynhurst's household.
She ought really to have gone to sleep, but whenever she closed her eyes some new thought of the morrow and of all the other morrows would make them spring open again.
The events of the last few hours had been so new that they had left her startled out of her usual quiet acquiescence. Mrs. Brenton's warm sympathy seemed to Caroline a heaven-sent gift. She had never realized the lack of this sympathy in her life till now, nor, in truth, all the many other things that she had lacked—those trivial everyday things which stock the lives of most young creatures. Her childish joys had all been secondhand ones. She had never had holidays, never any excitement; there had been no Christmas or birthday presents for her, no books or work-baskets, lace collars or ribbons. As a matter of fact, she did not even know on what date she had been born, and except for her school friends, and the little children whom she had taught the last two years, she had never been kissed. Yet for all this she had been a happy child and a happy girl.