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:
“What was the matter with you at dinner, Sue? You looked as if you were aware that something had happened and you were fearful lest it might be found out. Have you broken a china ornament, or has the cat been turning over the leaves of the 'History of Music' with her claws, and left her signature on the morocco of the cover?”
“What nonsense!” cried Susan. “Nothing has happened. What was there to happen, prithee tell me?”
“Ah, that is beyond my power,” he replied. “I suppose you girls will have your secrets—ay, ay; until some day you reveal them to another girl with the strictest of cautions never to let the matter go beyond her—and so forth—and so forth. Never mind, I'll not be the one to tempt you to blab. I never yet had a secret told to me that was worth wasting words over.”
“If I had a secret of importance I think that you would be a safe person to tell it to,” said Susy.
“You are right there,” he assented with a nautical wink. “You could find in me the safest depository you could wish for; you might safely depend upon my forgetting all about it within the hour.”
He did not trouble her any further, but she felt somewhat humiliated to think that she had had so little control of herself as to cause her brother's suspicions to be aroused. She thought that it would only be a matter of minutes when her father or her stepmother would approach her with further questions. Happily, however, it seemed that James was the keenest observer in the household, for no one put a question to her respecting her tell-tale face.
Still she was glad when she found herself safely and snugly in bed and so in a position to whisper across the room to her sister Charlotte the news that Fanny's novel had been printed and that a copy was safely locked up in Fanny's desk, and that it looked lovely in its new form.
Charlotte was greatly excited, but thought that Fanny might have told her the news before dinner.