“Mother,” said Hazel decidedly, “I cannot ask one of those gentlemen. Can you not see that it would be a degradation that I could not bear?”
“If you would think less of your own degradation, Hazel, and more of mine,” said Mrs Thorne, “I think it would be far more becoming on your part.”
It was breakfast-time, and, hot-eyed, feverish, and weary, Hazel was trying to force down a few morsels of dry bread as she sipped her weak tea.
She made no reply, but was working hard to find some solution of the difficulty in which she found herself, but could see none.
One thing was evident to her, and that was the fact that she must take the full blame of the pence being missing, and undertake to pay it out of her next half-year’s salary. It was impossible for her to accuse her mother, and she could think of no relatives who would advance the money. Her head ached violently, and she was suffering from a severe attack of lassitude that deadened her brain-power making her ready to go back to her bed and try to forget everything in sleep.
But there was the day’s work to meet and at last, in a dreary, hopeless spirit, she went to the school, seeing Mr Chute on his way to the duties of the day, and meeting his eye, which was full of an ugly, malicious expression, that made her shrink and feel that she had indeed made this man her enemy.
The children were more tiresome than usual, or seemed to be, and it was only by a great effort that she was able to keep her attention to the work in hand.
At another time she would not have noticed it, but now every tap at the schoolhouse door made her start violently, and think that it was the churchwarden, Mr Piper, come for the school pence.
“A guilty conscience needs no accuser,” she thought to herself, as she set to once more trying to see her way to some solution of her difficulty, but always in vain; and at last she found herself letting the trouble drift till it should find bottom in some shallow shoal or against the shore, for nothing she could do would help her on.
The only thing she could hit upon was to say to the churchwarden that she would bring him up the money shortly, and in the meantime she might find out some means of raising it wishing the while that the jewellery of which she once had a plentiful supply was still her own.