“Oh, then you know?” began Miss Archdale, and stopped.
“My dear, of course I know.”
“But you have done nothing!”
“Nothing yet. I am biding my time. Perhaps my work will be done for me by Peggy Desmond; in which case, God bless her!”
“But, my dear friend, forgive me, do you think it well to have a girl like Peggy under the thraldom of such a very knowing girl as Kitty Merrydew?”
“It won’t do Peggy any harm. Keep an eye on them both for the present, dear, and say nothing. You did right to come to me. I shall learn a great deal more about Peggy after Paul Wyndham comes here. And now, good-night, Julia. Don’t take things too seriously.”
CHAPTER XI.
ADVENTURE IN THE HOCKEY-FIELD.
When Peggy awoke the next morning she could not for a long time make out where she was or what had happened to her. She raised her head and looked around her. The light had hardly yet begun to break, and Peggy, accustomed all her life to wake at five o’clock, could not yet get over the habit. It is true that it was now very nearly six o’clock; but even so, six o’clock towards the latter end of September meant but a very faint degree of light. The girl’s first wish was to spring out of bed, to open her tiny attic window, and call to the little “hins” and the “turkey poults” the welcome intelligence that Peggy was coming; but, alack and alas! she was far, very far away from the hens, the turkeys, the geese of her happy childhood. It occurred to her for a wild minute that she was in bed in her large, luxurious, and hateful room at Preston Manor; from there she had at least the consolation of getting on the roof and making for the farmyard. But the window just opposite to her bed was longer and more severe-looking, and the little cubicle in which her bed reposed was plainly, though neatly, furnished.
“Ah wurra!” sighed Peggy, “I’m at school at long last, and it’s the bitter day for me—the bitter, bitter day for me!”
She little guessed, poor little thing, how very bitter that day was to be. She lay for a minute or two in her comfortable bed reflecting on the changes which had taken place, wishing earnestly that her father had not died and gone to glory, but had stayed in his “rigiment—a fine figure of a soldier, bedad!”—and had gone on sending a pound monthly for her maintenance to her good foster-parents. She looked round her little cubicle. There was no use in wishing for the past; the past, bedad, was over and done! “Why, I was finished off as nate as nate, in Ould Ireland,” she soliloquised; “whyiver should I be comin’ back to a fresh school at all? Bedad, I can’t make head nor tail of it, an’ I don’t like it, not a bit.”