"I don't pretend that I haven't, Irene. But I must do what my father and mother want during the holidays. I do think it would be a splendid plan to ask little Hughie and Agnes to spend August at The Follies. I wonder what Frosty would say? Let us ask her after supper."
Irene flung her arms round Rosamund's neck.
"I don't quite promise to be good," she said; "but I'll do my best. I will do it for your sake, more particularly if you will promise that you will be with us for the first few days."
"Yes, I'll be with you for the first week. They could come early next week, and I am not going away until the week after."
"Oh! don't talk about it; it is too horrible. Let us come into the fields and talk about ourselves."
The two girls did walk together, and it was Irene's turn to tell Rosamund some of the wild and fanciful fairy-tales which she was always making up. But she could never be still very long, and in the midst of her most earnest and fascinating stories she would rush from one end of the field to the other, or turn a somersault, or climb a tree and look down at Rosamund with her laughing, mocking face from the midst of the branches. But then again she would be good, and come back and say that the wicked little living thing inside her was quiet for the time being.
"I wonder if it will ever go away?" she said. "If it were gone I'd be much like other girls; but as long as it is there I can't be like any girl—I can't."
"There is such a thing as praying to God to take it away. But perhaps it is never meant to go," said Rosamund.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Perhaps it is a very beautiful gift that God has given you—something that you can't quite control at present, but something which will make you by-and-by different from others: more earnest, more enthusiastic, more full of spirit, more full of zeal. You have set your face steadily towards everything that has been naughty. You don't know yourself. Just tell that thing, as you call it, inside you that you are going up, not down, in future, and see if it won't behave itself and help you all the time."