Her orphanhood had cast no blight upon her, and she had made pleasures for herself out of her very unpromising surroundings, as most healthy young creatures will do.
Perhaps her greatest trial since she had lived with Octavia Baynhurst had been the fact that she had never once left London, and the call of the country to her nature at times had been so pressing that she had felt like a wild flower cribbed and confined in a world of bricks and mortar.
There had not even been a green leaf on which she could look. Mrs. Baynhurst did not care for flowers. Neither did she consider it necessary that anybody required exercise or fresh air.
Caroline had been rather a plump girl when she had said "good-bye" to her school, but she had wasted woefully in the last ten months. Though she had called herself strong when she had been speaking to Rupert Haverford, she possessed at this moment very little of her normal physical strength, but she had the force of a powerful will (although up to the present she had had scant opportunity of exercising this) and great courage, and to this she added the blessed gift of a cheerful spirit.
With the very smallest encouragement Caroline Graniger would be happy. There was nothing lachrymose about her or subservient. She had gone to Mrs. Baynhurst's primed with good intentions and eager to give of her very best to the woman who had claimed her.
Her schoolmistress had evidently been relieved to pass on the responsibility of Caroline to some other person, and, at the same time, had been rather flattered that one of her pupils should have been called upon to fill an important post with a person of such mental eminence.
Reflecting now on the events of the day just gone, Caroline came to the conclusion that she was rather glad there had been no opportunity of speaking with her first guardian, the mistress of the school.
"She would have put me through a cross-examination, and then I should have told her the truth, and then she would have been cross with me. I wonder where she has gone to? I feel sorry I have not written all these months. Perhaps she thinks me very ungrateful, for I firmly believe she kept me for a long time without any money."
This brought her back to the thought of what lay in the immediate future.
"I wish I knew a little more," she said restlessly to herself, "I am really very ignorant. No wonder that Mrs. Baynhurst found me useless! How she would sneer if she could know I have been trying to teach myself a little all these months!... Having made up her mind to the fact that I am a fool, she would strongly object to have to acknowledge that she had made a mistake, and I am not a fool," said Caroline to herself, with half a sigh and half a smile.