"I am not as happy as I was before I came to school," said Emily with bitterness, "and I wish with all my heart, that I had never been sent here."
"Yet you liked it very much at first!"
"I did not know much about it," returned Emily. "It was all new; and beside, things were different them."
"I admit that," said Mr. Fletcher. "There was a very different spirit in the school at that time from the one that prevails now. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump."
He seemed speaking more to himself than to her, and she dared not ask him what he meant.
"But however that may be," he continued, "it makes no difference to you. If you are living in habitual neglect of your religious duties—God not being in all your thoughts—you cannot be good or happy any where—no, not if you were in heaven itself, and the sooner you return to the right path, the better it will be to you, and the more easily you will find it. Be warned in time, my child! You may wander so far from that plain and narrow way, as never to find it again."
"Oh, if I dared tell him every thing!" thought Emily.
She looked up as this thought crossed her mind, and saw the Professor's dark eyes fastened upon her, as though he would read her very soul. She waited almost in terror for his next word, but he only repeated,—
"Be warned in time!" and returned to his reading.
If he had any idea of the true state of the case, he had evidently no idea of forcing her to the confession which she was almost ready to make of her own accord. Happy had it been for her if she had done so! But as she was deliberating, came Shame, and cowardly Fear, picturing to her mind the disgrace, the loss of her high position in school, the displeasure of her father and Mrs. Pomeroy's anger. She listened to the tempter, and locked her guilty secret in her heart again.