These words evidently startled Miss Peacock very much.
"You would rather your schoolfellows knew? But it has nothing to do with them."
"There would be nothing then to find out," continued Christian. "As it is, I shall live in fear. Oh! it was good of you—it was sweet of you—to keep it dark; but I think I would rather they knew."
Miss Peacock was amazed. She sat quite still for a minute; then she rose and walked to the other end of the room. She rang a bell, and in a few moments Jessie appeared. Jessie wore the same peculiar expression as she had worn the night before. The look of extreme juvenility, which vanished almost as soon as she began to speak, and her girlish dress, her girlish face, and her non-girlish voice, made her at once both striking and interesting.
"I understand from what Jessie has told me, that you have confided this matter to her, Christian," said Miss Peacock, turning to the young girl.
"I have. I had to; she was so very good to me, I could not let her live under the impression that I had been ill."
"I never gave anyone to understand that you were ill. I simply said that you were unavoidably detained. The girls are at liberty to form their own conclusions."
"There is an idea in the school that I was very ill," said Christian; "and," she added, "I don't like it, for you know"—she raised her clear eyes to Miss Peacock's face—"it is not true. You know it, don't you, Miss Peacock?"
Miss Peacock looked back at her with so intent a gaze that it seemed to the young girl that she was reading her through.
"Come here, Christian," she then said.