All her sympathies stirred within her, the old lady advanced to the girl with the intention of gathering her to her bosom. But as she drew near, the black and white of the open diary attracted her eye under the circle of lamplight, and being possessed of excellent long sight, she thought it no shame to utilise the same across her grand-niece's prostrate, heaving form, before making known her presence.
"And so I sit and cry."
Miss Molly was carrying out her programme with much precision, if indeed her attitude, prone along the table, could be described as sitting.
Miss O'Donoghue's eyes and mouth grew round, as with the expression of an outraged cockatoo she read and re-read the tell-tale phrases. Here was a complication she had not calculated upon.
"Dear, dear," she cried, clacking her tongue in disconsolate fashion, so soon as she could get her breath. "What is the meaning of this, my poor girl?"
Molly leaped to her feet, and turning a blazing, disfigured countenance upon her relative, exclaimed with more energy than politeness: "Good gracious, aunt, what do you want?"
Then catching sight of the open diary, she looked suspiciously from it to her visitor, and closed it with a hasty hand. But Miss O'Donoghue's next words settled the doubt.
"Well, to be sure, what a state you have put yourself into," she pursued in genuine distress. "What has happened then between you and that fellow, whom I declare I begin to believe as crazy as Rupert says, that you should be crying your eyes out over his going back to his island?—you that I thought could not shed a tear if you tried. Nothing left but to sit and cry, indeed."
"So you have been reading my diary, you mean thing," cried Miss Molly, stamping her foot. "How dare you come creeping in here, spying at my private concerns! Oh! oh! oh!" with unpremeditated artfulness, relapsing into a paroxysm of sobs just in time to avert the volley of rebuke with which the hot-tempered old lady was about to greet this disrespectful outburst. "I am the most miserable girl in all the world. I wish I were dead, I do."
Again Tanty opened her arms, and this time she did draw the stormy creature to a bosom, as warm and motherly as if all the joys of womanhood had not been withheld from it.