"Oh! my dear Ruth," interrupted the governess hastily, "I am not disparaging Mrs. Cole, and I have no right to express an opinion concerning her conduct, but I think—yes, I am quite sure that I prefer Nan not to join your party."
Ruth jumped from her chair with a cry of protest: "O Miss Blake! Don't say that! Think of it, we're going to drive down as far as Howe's and have a supper and it will be such fun. We want Nan awfully. She's just the best company in the world, and if she doesn't go it will be—well, it will be too bad. Do please say she may."
Miss Blake shook her head somewhat sadly. "I can't say so, Ruth. There are special reasons why Nan ought not to go—reasons that I can only explain to her, but which I am sure she will understand. You other girls have your mothers, but Nan has none, and that means that she has no protector, now that her father is absent, unless I can stand in such a relation to her. Believe me, I do not voluntarily deny Nan any pleasure, but there are some instances in which I must."
"But it's going to be perfectly proper," Ruth insisted, almost in tears. "You don't think my mother would let me go if it wasn't going to be perfectly proper, do you, Miss Blake?"
The governess stood before the fire and rested her arm on the high mantel-shelf, tapping the fender lightly with the toe of her slipper. At Ruth's question she turned her head quickly from the flames toward the girl with a compassionate smile.
"No," she hastened to declare, "I am sure your mother would not let you go to anything that she knew to be in any respect not altogether as it should be."
There was just the shade of an emphasis on the word knew—just the merest breath of a pause before it. Miss Blake gazed frankly and fearlessly into the girl's eyes as she spoke, and Ruth's lids dropped suddenly as if she had been trying to look at the sun and it had blinded her.
There was a pause and in it they could distinctly hear Nan's feet going to and fro on the floor above their heads, and her sharp young voice shouting the chorus of some tuneless popular air, in her own perfectly cheerful, earless fashion.
"Oh, Miss Blake, please!" quavered Ruth.
If she had known the governess as well as Nan did she would have known that it was worse than useless to "tease." As it was, she was aware of some force here that did not appear in her own easy-going mother, and unconsciously she bowed to it—but even as she did so she gave a last wail of entreaty from pure force of habit.