"What do you mean by your doom?"
"Ah, that's telling, little one," said Cynthia, who seemed now to have recovered her usual manner. "I don't mean to have one, though. I think that, though I am an arrant coward at heart, I can show fight."
"With whom?" asked Molly, really anxious to probe the mystery—if, indeed, there was one—to the bottom, in the hope of some remedy being found for the distress Cynthia was in when first Molly entered.
Again Cynthia was lost in thought; then, catching the echo of Molly's last words in her mind, she said,—
"'With whom?'—oh! show fight with whom?—why, my doom, to be sure. Am not I a grand young lady to have a doom? Why, Molly, child, how pale and grave you look!" said she, kissing her all of a sudden. "You ought not to care so much for me; I'm not good enough for you to worry yourself about me. I've given myself up a long time ago as a heartless baggage!"
"Nonsense! I wish you wouldn't talk so, Cynthia!"
"And I wish you wouldn't always take me 'at the foot of the letter,' as an English girl at school used to translate it. Oh, how hot it is! Is it never going to get cool again? My child! what dirty hands you've got, and face too; and I've been kissing you—I daresay I'm dirty with it, too. Now, isn't that like one of mamma's speeches? But, for all that, you look more like a delving Adam than a spinning Eve." This had the effect that Cynthia intended; the daintily clean Molly became conscious of her soiled condition, which she had forgotten while she had been attending to Cynthia, and she hastily withdrew to her own room. When she had gone, Cynthia noiselessly locked the door; and, taking her purse out of her desk, she began to count over her money. She counted it once—she counted it twice, as if desirous of finding out some mistake which should prove it to be more than it was; but the end of it all was a sigh.
"What a fool!—what a fool I was!" said she, at length. "But even if I don't go out as a governess, I shall make it up in time."
Some weeks after the time he had anticipated when he had spoken of his departure to the Gibsons, Roger returned back to the Hall. One morning when he called, Osborne told them that his brother had been at home for two or three days.
"And why has he not come here, then?" said Mrs. Gibson. "It is not kind of him not to come and see us as soon as he can. Tell him I say so—pray do."