Mrs Willis took Nan on her knee. She felt that the little will must be bent to hers, but the task was no easy one. The child scarcely knew her, she was still weak and excitable, and she presently burst into storms of tears, and sobbed and sobbed as though her little heart would break, her one cry being for “Annie, Annie, Annie.” When Annie did join her in the play hour, the little cheeks were flushed, the white brow ached, and the child’s small hands were hot and feverish. Mrs Willis felt terribly puzzled.
Chapter Twenty Six.
Under The Laurel-Bush.
Mrs Willis owned to herself that she was nonplussed; it was quite impossible to allow Annie to neglect her studies, and yet little Nan’s health was still too precarious to allow her to run the risk of having the child constantly fretted.
Suddenly a welcome idea occurred to her; she would write at once to Nan’s old nurse, and see if she could come to Lavender House for the remainder of the present term. Mrs Willis dispatched her letter that very day, and by the following evening the nurse was once more in possession of her much-loved little charge. The habits of her babyhood were too strong for Nan; she returned to them gladly enough, and though in her heart of hearts she was still intensely loyal to Annie, she no longer fretted when she was not with her.
Annie resumed her ordinary work and though Hester was very cold to her, several of the other girls in the school frankly confided to their favourite how much they had missed her, and how glad they were to have her back with them once more.
Annie found herself at this time in an ever-shifting mood—one moment she longed intensely for a kiss, and a fervent pardon from Mrs Willis’s lips; another, she said to herself defiantly she could and would live without it; one moment the hungry and sorrowful look in Hester’s eyes went straight to Annie’s heart, and she wished she might restore her little treasure whom she had stolen; the next she rejoiced in her strange power over Nan, and resolved to keep all the love she could get.
In short, Annie was in that condition when she could be easily influenced for good or evil—she was in that state of weakness when temptation is least easily resisted.