“I quite understand, my dear; and when the time comes kindness will not be wanting. Now go away and amuse yourself with your sisters.”
Verena went away. She wondered as she did so where Pauline was hiding herself. The others had all settled down to their various amusements and occupations. They were sorry for Pauline, but the pleasant time they were enjoying in the middle of this lovely summer’s day was not to be despised, even if their sister was under punishment. But Verena herself could not rest. She went into the schoolroom. On a tray stood poor Pauline’s neglected dinner. Verena lifted the cover from the plate, and felt as though she must cry.
“Pauline is taking it hardly,” thought the elder girl.
Tea-time came, and Pauline’s tea was also sent to the schoolroom. At preparation hour, when the rest of the girls went into the room, Pauline’s tea remained just where it had been placed an hour before. Verena could scarcely bear herself. There must be something terribly wrong with her sister. They had often been hungry in the old days, but in the case of a hearty, healthy girl, to do without any food from breakfast-time when there was plenty to eat was something to regard with uneasiness.
Presently, however, to her relief, Pauline came in. She looked rough and untidy in appearance. She slipped into the nearest chair in a sulky, ungainly fashion, and taking up a battered spelling-book, she held it upside down.
Verena gave her a quick glance and looked away. Pauline would not meet Verena’s anxious gaze. She kept on looking down. Occasionally her lips moved. There was a red stain on her cheek. Penelope with one of her sharpest glances perceived this.
“It is caused by fruit,” thought the youngest of the schoolroom children. “I wonder who has given Pauline fruit. Did she climb the garden wall or get over the gate into the orchard?”
Nobody else noticed this stain. Miss Tredgold came in presently, but she took no more notice of Pauline than if that young lady did not exist.
The hour of preparation was over. It was now six o’clock. In an hour Pauline was expected to go to bed. Now, Pauline and Verena had bedrooms to themselves. These were attic rooms at the top of the house. They had sloping roofs, and would have been much too hot in summer but for the presence of a big beech tree, which grew to within a few feet of the windows. More than once the girls in their emancipated days, as they now considered them, used to climb down the beech tree from their attic windows, and on a few occasions had even managed to climb up the same way. They loved their rooms, having slept in them during the greater part of their lives.
Pauline, as she now went in the direction of the north walk, thought with a sense of satisfaction of the bedroom she had to herself.