"You can't think how furious they are now if we happen on the same thing. I do my best to oblige them. I suppose a—Miss Appleby—"
Val tried to find out from the non-committal face whether the principal had entered upon this. If not, so much confessing all in one day was perhaps overdoing it.
"Well," said her grandmother, "Miss Appleby tells me—I can hardly credit it—that you stood up in your place yesterday morning and recited, 'Comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love.'"
"Well, it wasn't me that laughed; and I told Miss Appleby it was in the Bible right enough."
"Yes. Well, I'll pick out your texts for you in future." She spoke with charming geniality, and a glint through her glasses. "Now go and get your lessons for to-morrow."
After the failure of Miss Beach to have Val disgraced and expelled, the girl felt that though her grandmother might herself abuse her, she would not permit any one else to do so. The early years of warfare merged by degrees, and in spite of lapses, into a less lawless scheme of life.
The reason of it was not in any great measure regard for her father. He lived too much apart from the din of daily events for their remote effect on him to be much present to the preoccupied mind of youth. The change came about through a growing, albeit unwilling, admiration and sense of friendship for her grandmother. She was entertaining, this old lady, in spite of her terrible faults. One was never dull with her. She told delightful stories, and she laughed at yours when they were good. Indeed, no matter how abandoned had been your conduct, if you could make her laugh you were saved. It was not in child-nature not to lay traps for that pardoning gleam of the fierce eye, that involuntary twitching of the judicial mouth. An exchange of anecdotes tends inevitably to a good understanding. But more than by any other means, perhaps, the perverse school-girl and the autocratic old woman were brought together by a mutual recognition of a common regard for justice. When Val found out that her grandmother was not as arbitrary as she had supposed, the battle was half over. Mrs. Gano had been overheard advising her son, "Don't try to coerce Val. If you can convince that child's reason you can do what you like with her, but you can't drive her an inch." The girl felt that she was being understood. Perhaps the truth was they were both changing, both developing, the old no less than the young.
Certain it is they became better and better friends, and had surprisingly much in common. Still, Val had struggled so long against owning to herself that any good could come out of this Nazareth, that it was some time before a belated sense of fairness led her to avow guardedly to her old fellow-sufferer her new view of the autocrat. She must try, little by little, to convince her father that, contrary to appearance, and despite many sore experiences, his mother had her good points.
"Gran'ma's been real kind to me and Julia to-day."
"Has she?"