She had been at the Brompton gynæceum nearly eleven years—only leaving it for her holidays—and now her education was finished, and Mr. Sheldon could find no excuse for leaving her at school any longer, so her departure had been finally agreed upon.
To most damsels of twenty-one this would have been a subject for rejoicing; but it was not so with Charlotte. She did not like her stepfather; and her mother, though very affectionate and gentle, was a person whose society was apt to become wearisome any time after the first half-hour of social intercourse. At Hyde Lodge Charlotte had a great deal more of Lingard and condensed and expurgated Gibbon than was quite agreeable; she had to get up at a preternatural hour in the morning and to devote herself to "studies of velocity," whose monotony became wearing as the drip, drip, drip of water on the skull of the tortured criminal. She was very tired of all the Hyde-Lodge lessons and accomplishments, the irregular French verbs—the "braires" and "traires" which were so difficult to remember, and which nobody ever could want to use in polite conversation; the ruined castles and dilapidated windmills, the perpetual stumpy pieces of fallen timber and jagged posts, executed with a BBB pencil; the chalky expanse of sky, with that inevitable flight of crows scudding across it:—why must there be always crows scudding across a drawing-master's sky, and why so many jagged posts in a drawing-master's ideal of rural beauty? Charlotte was inexpressibly weary of all the stereotyped studies; but she liked Hyde Lodge better than the gothic villa. She liked the friendly schoolfellows with their loud talk and boisterous manners, the girls who called her "Halliday," and who were always borrowing her reels of crochet-cotton and her pencils, her collars and pocket-handkerchiefs. She liked the free-and-easy schoolgirl talk better than her mother's tame discourse; she preferred the homely litter of the spacious schoolroom to the prim splendours of Georgy's state chambers; and the cool lawn and shrubberies of Hyde Lodge were a hundred-fold more pleasant to her than the stiff little parterre at Bayswater, wherein scarlet geraniums and calceolarias flourished with an excruciating luxuriance of growth and an aggravating brilliancy of colour. She liked any place better than the hearth by which Philip Sheldon brooded with a dark thoughtful face, and a mind absorbed by the mysteries and complications of the Stock Exchange.
On this bright June afternoon other girls were chattering gaily about the fun of the breaking-up ball and the coming delights of the holidays, but Charlotte sighed when they reminded her that the end of her last half was close at hand.
She sat under a group of trees on the lawn, with a crochet antimacassar lying in her lap, and with her friend and favourite, Diana Paget, sitting by her side.
Hyde Lodge was that very establishment over which Priscilla Paget had reigned supreme for the last seventeen years of her life, and among all the pupils in a school of some forty or fifty girls, Diana was the one whom Charlotte Halliday had chosen for her dearest companion and confidante, clinging to her with a constancy not to be shaken by ill-fortune or absence. The girl knew very well that Diana Paget was a poor relation and dependant; that her bills had never been paid; that all those incalculable and mysterious "extras," which are the martyrdom of parents and the delight of schoolmistresses, were a dead letter so far as Diana was concerned. She knew that "poor Di" had been taken home suddenly one day, not in compliance with any behest of her father's, but for the simple reason that her kinswoman's patience had been worn out by the Captain's dishonesty. It is doubtful whether Priscilla Paget had ever communicated these facts in any set phrase, but in a boarding-school such things make themselves known, and the girls had discussed the delinquencies of that dreadful creature, Captain Paget, very freely in the security of their dormitories.
Charlotte knew that her dearest friend was not a person whom it was advantageous to know. She had seen Diana depart ignominiously, and return mysteriously after an absence of some years, very shabby, very poor, very sombre and melancholy, and with no inclination to talk of those years of absence. Miss Halliday had known all this, and had asked no questions. She took the returned wanderer to her heart, and cherished her with an affection which was far beyond the average measure of sisterly love.
"I thought I should never see you again, dear," she cried when she and Diana had retired to a corner of the schoolroom to talk confidentially on the morning of Miss Paget's return; "and I missed you so cruelly. Other girls are very nice and very kind to me. There is a new girl, Miss Spencer—that girl with flaxen hair, standing by the big Canterbury—whom I get on with delightfully; but there is no one in the world like you, Di. And where have you been all this time? With your papa, I suppose."
"Yes," answered Miss Paget gloomily; "I have been with my father. Don't ask me anything about the last three years, Lotta. I have been utterly wretched and miserable, and I can't bear to talk about my misery."
"And you shan't talk of it, darling," cried Charlotte, pursing up her mouth for a kiss in a manner which might have been distraction to a masculine mind of average susceptibility. "You shan't talk of anything or think of anything the least, least, least bit unpleasant; and you shall have my gold pencil-case," added Miss Halliday, wrenching that trinket suddenly from the ribbon by which it hung at her side. Perhaps there was just the least touch of Georgy's childishness in this impulsive habit of giving away all her small possessions, for which Lotta was distinguished. "Yes, you must, dear," she went on. "Mamma gave it me last half; but I don't want it; I don't like it; in point of fact, I have had it so long that I positively loathe it. And I know it's a poor trumpery thing, though mamma gave two guineas for it; but you know she is always imposed upon in shops. Do, do, do take it, darling, just to oblige me. And now, tell me, dear,—you're going to stop here for ever and ever, now you've come back" asked Charlotte, after having thrust the gold pencil-case into Diana's unwilling hand.
"I don't know about for ever and ever, dear," Miss Paget replied presently; "but I daresay I shall stay here till I'm tired of the place and everybody about it. You won't be here very long, you know, Lotta; for you'll be twenty next birthday, and I suppose you'll be leaving school before you're twenty-one. Most of the girls leave at eighteen or nineteen at latest; and you've been here so long, and are so much farther advanced than others are. I am not going to be a pupil again—that's out of the question; for I'm just twenty-two, as you know. But Priscilla has been good enough to let me stay as a kind of second teacher for the little ones. It will be dull work going through the stupid abridgments of history and geography, and the scrappy bits of botany and conchology, with those incorrigible little ones; but of course I am very grateful to my cousin for giving me a home under any conditions, after papa's dishonourable conduct. If it were not for her, Lotta, I should have no home. What a happy girl you are, to have a respectable man for your father!"