Doris is Jealous
IT was an oppressively hot August day—far too hot to go out into the sunshine for pleasure—and Miss Barton and her pupils were spending the hour before dinner, which they usually passed in the open air, in the schoolroom at the Vicarage. From the window was an extensive view of fields golden with ripening grain, and others where the corn was being cut, whilst in the big field adjoining the kitchen garden, at the back of the house, the sheaves stood in mows, ready to be carted away.
"There's not a breath of air stirring," remarked Molly, as she leaned head and shoulders out of the window; "I believe it's the hottest day we've had this year."
"I think it was quite as hot in June," responded Felicia; "at least, it was in Bristol. I remember—"
"What do you remember?" asked Doris curiously. She was leaning back in an easy-chair, her hands clasped behind her head. She had been watching Felicia with a thoughtful expression on her countenance and a sensation of jealousy in her heart, because her cousin had driven with her grandfather to T— on Saturday, and she would have liked to have gone herself. "Go on, Felicia," she said a trifle impatiently; "why do you stop?"
"I was only going to say that I remember my mother fainted with the heat one day in June; but then, of course, she was ill and felt it more on that account. Oh, it was dreadfully hot in—where we lived!"
"By the way, in what part of Bristol did you live?" asked Molly; "you have never told us. Mother took us to Bristol to see an exhibition of pictures in the spring; I wish we'd known you were living there then; we'd have called to see you."
"I'm glad you didn't!" Felicia exclaimed involuntarily. "That is," she added in some confusion, "I don't think you would have cared for the part where we lived, and it was right at the top of the house, in one room—"
She paused, struck by the expression of bewilderment on the faces of both of her cousins. Although she had never told them of her life in Bristol, she had imagined they must know about it; but she now saw that they had been ignorant concerning the full extent of the poverty she and her mother had endured.
"You lived in one room!" Molly cried in shocked tones. "Oh, Felicia, were you so poor as that? We knew your mother was obliged to do needlework, but we never knew before that you lived in one room. Oh, how awful!"