“No, you won’t, you silly girl. As to your thinking that we English girls will think any the less of you, you may be certain we won’t.”
But, after all, the punishment which was so severe, which I so dreaded, which seemed to shake my nature to its very depths and to turn me at once from a happy, interested, contented girl into a mass of sulkiness and misery, was, for the time at least, to be averted—averted in a very fearful way—for that evening there came a telegram from my step-mother:
“Your father very ill; one of the teachers must bring you back immediately.”
Mademoiselle Wrex was the lady who had the task of conveying me home. There was a great fuss and bustle and distress in the school when the telegram reached me. I scarcely knew what to do with myself. Augusta was speechless with misery. She begged and implored me to take her with me.
“But I can’t,” I said. “And why should I? He is not your father.”
“No,” said the poor thing—“no.”
I really pitied her. She sank back on the sofa in our little sitting-room with a face like death.
“If you see him, can you just tell him how he has helped me?”
“I will,” I said. I pitied her now. What had seemed silly and unreasonable when the Professor was in health assumed quite a different aspect when the dear Professor was dangerously ill.
My feelings were torn between the misery of the morning and my relief at not being publicly disgraced before the other girls, and the terror and fear of returning to my home to find my father very ill.