“And they do say,” sighed Mrs Thorne, “that my daughter is growing greatly like what I used to be.”
Meanwhile Hazel passed out into the grounds, where she was encountered almost directly by Beatrice Lambent, who, assuming utter ignorance of where the schoolmistress had been, exclaimed—
“Oh, you are there. Miss Thorne. Pray—pray get back to the children. My brother has been astonished at your having left them for so long.”
People fight with different weapons to those used of old, but they are quite as sharp.
Chapter Twelve.
Taken to Task.
There was too much sheer hard work at Plumton School for Hazel Thorne to have much time for thoughts of anything but business. She had seen no more of Archibald Graves, but she was never outside the house without feeling nervous and in full expectation of meeting him; but as the days wore on she began to hope that her firm behaviour had not been without its effect.
For a day or two she had felt agitated, and in the solitude of her own room she had more than once wept bitterly for her love, but they were tears such as are shed for the past and gone. There was no hope in them: they brought neither relief nor thought of the future. Hazel Thorne’s sorrow was for a dead love, and she preferred to think of Archibald Graves as the ideal lover of her girlish heart, not as the real suitor who had come to her now that she was a woman, who had been tried in the fire of adversity, and been found base.