"I mean it," he answered gaily.
At once he resumed his office. We had scarcely begun when Miriam entered. She came almost every evening, for as her aunt was still at Hastings, Cornelius never visited her. From the door I saw her look at us, as we sat at the table, his arm on the back of my chair, his bent face close to mine, with a mute, expressive glance.
"Yes," said Cornelius, smiling, as he smoothed my hair, "I have got my pupil back again. The remedy was found worse than the disease."
Miriam smiled too. She gave up the point and attempted no more to deprive me of my teacher, but I had to pay dear in the daytime for what I received in the evening.
Whilst she sat for Medora, I studied or sewed. She said little to me, but every word bore its sting. Cornelius never detected the irony that lurked beneath the seeming praise and apparent kindness. She tormented me with impunity. There were so many points in which she could irritate my secret wound; for I was still intensely jealous of her, and though Cornelius and Kate thought me cured, she knew better.
But suffering gives premature wisdom.
I had entered my fourteenth year—I was no longer quite a child. When she made me feel, as she did almost daily, that I was plain, sallow, and sickly, my vanity smarted, but I reflected that Cornelius liked me in spite of these disadvantages, and I bore the insult silently; when however she made me see that Cornelius was devoted to her, that my place in his heart was as far removed from hers, as she was above me in years, beauty, and many gifts, I could scarcely bear it. That it should be so was bad enough, but to be taunted with it by the intruder who had come between him and me, wakened within me every emotion of anger and jealous grief; yet I had sufficient power over myself to control the outward manifestations of these feelings. Taught by the past, I mistrusted her. Weeks elapsed, and she could not make me fall into my old errors, or betray me into any outbreak of temper. But alas! even whilst I governed myself externally, I sought not to rule my heart, which daily grew more embittered against her. To this, and this only, I recognize it—I owed what happened. But before proceeding further, I cannot help recording a little incident which surprised me then, and which, when I look back on those times, still gives me food for thought.
The blind nurse of Miriam had returned with her from Hastings. I believe Miss Russell never moved without this old woman, to whom she was devotedly kind: she humoured her as she would have humoured a child, and, amongst other things, indulged her in the homely fashion of sitting at the front door of the house, in the narrow strip of garden that divided it from the Grove. It had been a favourite habit of hers to sit thus years back at the door of her cottage home; sightless though she was, she liked to sit so still; in the absence of old Miss Russell she did so freely. We too had a little front garden, divided from that of our neighbours by a low trellis. I was seldom in it, unless to water the few flowers it contained. I was thus engaged one calm evening, when the old woman sat alone at her door. She was wrinkled and aged; yet she had a happy, childish face, as if in feelings as well as in years she had gently returned to a second infancy. I noticed that as I moved about she bent her head and listened attentively.
"Do you want anything?" I asked, going up to the partition near which she sat.
Her face brightened; she stretched out her hand, felt me, and smiled.