"I'm sure it isn't the lessons," said Esther again. "Sometimes I think perhaps it's my hair. It makes my head so hot, and at night I can't always sleep."
Mr. Trelawny lifted the heavy mass of curly locks and weighed it in his hand. He looked at Mr. Earle, and they spoke a few words together in the strange tongue.
"Did you ever complain to your mother about your hair?" asked Mr. Trelawny, with a gleam in his deepset eyes.
"Yes," answered Esther, "I often used to ask her if I mightn't have it short like Milly Polperran; but she doesn't like me to tease about it, so I've given it up."
Mr. Trelawny reached out his hand towards a table upon which lay a pair of sharp scissors in a sheath. The gleam in his eyes was deepening. Mr. Earle said something in the foreign tongue, and he answered back in his sharp, decisive way. Esther lay still, wondering; but they were both behind her, and she could not see.
Then came a strange, grating sound close to her head, another, and another; and before she realized what was happening, Mr. Trelawny suddenly laid upon her lap a great mass of waving chestnut hair, exclaiming as he did so,—
"There, my dear! take that home to your mother with my best compliments; and as for me, I shall have to find a new name for little Goldylocks."
Then Esther realized that her hair had been cut off by Mr. Trelawny, and she lay looking at it with thrills of excitement running through her. What would her mother say when she got home? and what would it feel like to be relieved of that great floating mass of hair? How delightful to have no tugging and pulling at the knots morning and night, often when her head was aching and tender, and every pull seemed to hurt more than the last! She must get up and feel what it was like.
So she sat up and passed her hands over her head. Mr. Trelawny and Mr. Earle were looking at her and laughing. Esther had to laugh too; but how light and cool it felt!
"It is nice!" she exclaimed. "I feel as if I'd got a new head! Oh. I hope mama will not mind much!"