Chapter Thirty Seven.
A Broken Trust.
The next morning Annie Forest opened her eyes with that strange feeling of indifference and want of vivacity which come so seldom to youth. She saw the sun shining through the closed blinds; she heard the birds twittering and singing in the large elm-tree which nearly touched the windows; she knew well how the world looked at this moment, for often and often in her old light-hearted days she had risen before the maid came to call her, and, kneeling by the deep window-ledge, had looked out at the bright fresh, sparkling day. A new day, with all its hours before it, its light vivid but not too glaring, its dress all manner of tender shades and harmonious colourings! Annie had a poetical nature, and she gloried in these glimpses which she got all by herself of the fresh, glad world.
To-day, however, she lay still, sorry to know that the brief night was at an end, and that the day, with its coldness and suspicion, its terrible absence of love and harmony, was about to begin.
Annie’s nature was very emotional; she was intensely sensitive to her surroundings; the greyness of her present life was absolute destruction to such a nature as hers.
The dressing-bell rang; the maid came in to draw up the blinds, and call the girls. Annie rose languidly, and began to dress herself.
She first finished her toilet, and then approached her little bed, and stood by its side for a moment hesitating. She did not want to pray, and yet she felt impelled to go down on her knees. As she knelt with her curls falling about her face, and her bands pressed to her eyes, one line of one of her favourite poems came flashing with swiftness and power across; her memory—
“A soul which has sinned and is pardoned again.”
The words filled her whole heart with a sudden sense of peace and of great longing.
The prayer-bell rang: she rose, and, turning to Susan Drummond, said earnestly—