Before she reached the door of the room she had burst into tears. Her agony was so great at Pauline’s behavior to her that her tears became sobs, and her sobs almost cries of pain. Pauline, lying on the bed, did not take the least notice of Verena. She turned her head away, and when her sister had left the room and shut the door Pauline sprang from the bed and turned the key in the lock.
“Now, I am safe,” she thought. “What is the matter with me? There never was anything so hard as the heart that is inside me. I don’t care a bit whether Renny cries or whether she doesn’t cry. I don’t care a bit what happens to any one. I only want to be let alone.”
At dinner-time Pauline appeared, and tried to look as though nothing had happened. The other girls looked neat and pretty. They had not the least idea through what a tragedy Verena and Pauline were now living. Verena showed marks of her storm of weeping, and her face was terribly woebegone. Miss Tredgold guessed that things were coming to a crisis, and she was prepared to wait.
Now, Miss Tredgold was a very good woman; she was also a very wise and a very temperate one. She was filled with a spirit of forbearance, and with the beautiful grace of charity. She was all round as good a woman as ever lived; but she was not a mother. Had she been a mother she would have gone straight to Pauline and put her arms round her, and so acted that the hard little heart would have melted, and the words that could not pass her lips would have found themselves able to do so, and the misery and the further sin would have been averted. But instead of doing anything of this sort, Miss Tredgold resolved to assemble the children after breakfast the next day, and to talk to them in a very plain way indeed; to assemble all before her, and to entreat the guilty ones to confess, promising them absolute forgiveness in advance. Having made up her mind, she felt quite peaceful and happy, and went down to interview her brother-in-law.
Mr. Dale still continued to like his study. He made no further objection to the clean and carefully dusted room. If any one had asked him what was passing in his mind, he might have said that the spirits of Homer and Virgil approached the sacred precincts where he wrote about them and lived for them night after night, and that they put the place in order. He kept the rough words which he had printed in large capitals on the night when he had returned to his study still in their place of honor on the wall, and he worked himself with a new sense of zest and freedom.
Miss Tredgold entered the room without knocking.
“Well, Henry,” she said, “and how goes the world?”
“The world of the past comes nearer and nearer,” was his reply. “I often feel that I scarcely touch the earth of the nineteenth century. The world of the past is a very lovely world.”
“Not a bit better than the world of the present,” said Miss Sophia. “Now, Henry, if you can come from the clouds for a minute or two——”
“Eh? Ah! What are you saying?”