“Oh, Fanny, ’tis so wonderful—so—”
“I don’t want to hear anything about it beyond what you have already told me, my dear Susy. I watched your face and it told me all. Give me a kiss, Susy. You have given me a sensation of pleasure such as I never knew before, and such as, I fear, I shall never know again.”
In an instant the two girls were in each other’s arms, mingling their tears and then their laughter, but exchanging no word until they had exhausted every other means of expressing what they felt.
It was Susy who spoke first.
“Take it away, Fanny,” she said. “Take the book away, for I know that if I read any more of it I shall betray your secret to all the house. They will read it on my face every time I look at you.”
“I think that the hour has come for me to relieve you of the precious book,” said Fanny. “There is the letter from Mr. Lowndes asking me to make out the list of errata as quickly as possible, and I do believe that I shall have to read the book before I can oblige him.”
“’Twas thoughtless for me to jump into the middle as I did, when you had to read it,” cried Susy. “But there is really no mistake on any page, so far as I could see.”
“Unless the whole is a mistake,” said Fanny. “But I will not suggest that now, having seen your face while you were devouring it. Dear Susy, if I find many such readers I shall be happy.”
She gathered together the loose sheets and carried them off to the little room at the top of the house where it was understood she wrote her long weekly letter to Mr. Crisp, who had made himself a hermit at Chessington, but who, like some other hermits, looked forward with impatience to the delightful glimpses of the world which he had forsaken, afforded to him on every page written by her.
Susy did not see her again until dinner-time, and by that time the younger girl felt that she had herself under such complete control that she could preserve inviolate the secret of the authorship until it should cease to be a secret. The result of her rigid control of herself was that her brother James said to her when they were having tea in the drawing-room: