“I can see it all now, looking back,” said Hatty. “It was all one great whole; but at the time I did not see it at all. They seemed mere passing remarks, bits of conversation that came in anyhow.”
Hatty felt sure that Mrs Crossland was a concealed Papist long before she suspected the young man. And when, at last, both threw the mask off, they had her fast in their toils. She was strictly warned never to talk with me except on mere trifling subjects; and she had to give an account of every word that had been said when she returned. If she hid the least thing from them, she was assured it would be a terrible sin.
“But you don’t mean to say you believed all that rubbish?” cried I.
“It was not a question of belief,” she answered. “I loved him. I would have done anything in all the world to win a smile from him; and he knew it. As to belief—I do not know what I believed: my brain felt like a chaos, and my heart in a whirl.”
“And now, Hatty?” said I. I meant to ask what she believed now: but she answered me differently.
“Now,” she said, in a low, hopeless voice, “the shrine is deserted, and the idol is broken, and the world feels a great wide, empty place where there is no room for me—a cold, hard place that I must toil through, and the only hope left is to get to the end as soon as possible.”
Oh, I wish Flora or Annas were here! I do not know how to deal with my poor Hatty. Thoughts which would comfort me seem to fall powerless with her; and I have nobody to counsel me. I suppose my Aunt Kezia would say I must set the Lord before me; but I do not see how to do it in this case. I am sure I have prayed enough. What I want is an angel to whisper to me what to do again; and my angel has gone back into Heaven, I suppose, for I feel completely puzzled now. At any rate, I do hope things have done happening.
Note 1. Our forefathers thought colds a much more serious affair than we do. They probably knew much less about them.