Erminie grieved bitterly over the departure of her brother; yet she, no more than Britomarte, would have kept him back even if she could have done so. But she wept and prayed through the whole of the succeeding night. Only the reflection that he was doing his duty to his country, and the belief that her prayers for his safety would be heard in Heaven, at length sufficed to console her.
The next morning she had no time to grieve and but little to pray. A busy and exciting day was before her.
Early in the forenoon, Lieutenant Ethel, with earnestly grateful acknowledgments of the affectionate hospitality he had enjoyed for so many weeks, took a sorrowful leave of the parsonage.
It is true that he need not have hurried away to join his ship at Baltimore that day. But a fine sense of delicacy suggested to him a certain impropriety in his remaining the guest of a house where there were only two young ladies left to entertain him. So he took leave a few hours previous to the departure of Major Fielding.
“I feel really sorry that he is gone. He is a gentlemanly young officer,” said Erminie, looking after the hack that was conveying him to the railway station.
“Yes, but he was a nuisance for all that! and I am very glad he is out of the way,” said Elfie, who was standing by her side.
“Oh, Elfie, how can you say any thing so unkind!”
“It isn’t unkind; it is true.”
“He never was in my way.”
“No; because you are so methodical, you never can be put out by anything. You rise, dress, eat, walk, read and sleep by rule. Now I’m different. I like to sail all over the house in a loose wrapper, without the danger of meeting with one of the male sect of Christians. And when I am in a hurry in the morning I like to run down from my chamber to the kitchen in my bare feet. But I declare I never undertook to do either, yet, while there was a male creature in the house, that the male creature did not start out of the drawing-room or the library and meet me full face, as if Old Nick had kicked him into my path. Not that I cared, only I didn’t like it. And so I’m heartily glad Ethel for one is gone.