CHAPTER VIII.
Mona did try to be good, she tried hard, but she was very, very unhappy. She missed her home, she missed Lucy, and her father, and her freedom. She longed, too, with an intolerable longing, for the sight and the sound of the sea. She had never, till now that she had lost them, realised how dearly she loved the quaint little steep and rambling village, with the sea at its foot, and the hills behind it. She was always homesick.
Perhaps if she had been sent to Hillside, and it had been her plain duty to live there, and nowhere else, she might have felt more happy and settled. Or, if granny had been the same indulgent, sympathetic granny as of old, but she had placed herself where she was by her own foolish, unkind act, which she now bitterly repented; and she was there with a cloud resting on her character and motives. She had shown herself ungrateful and unkind; she had played a coward's part, and had bitterly pained her father and Lucy.
They did not reproach her—she would have felt better had they done so— but she knew. And, after all, granny did not want her, or so it seemed!
Mona did not realise that her grandmother was really seriously unwell, and that her irritability she could not help. Mrs. Barnes did not know it herself. Mona only realised that she was almost always cross, that nothing pleased her, that she never ran and fetched and carried, as she used to do, while Mona sat by the fire and read. It was granny who sat by the fire now. She did not read, though. She said her eyes pained her, and her head ached too much. She did not sew, either. She just sat idly by the fire and moped and dozed, or roused herself to grumble at something or other.
The day after she came to Hillside, Mona had written to her mother. She told her where she was, and why, and tried to say that she was sorry, but no reply had come, and this troubled her greatly.
"Were they too angry with her to have anything more to say to her? Was Lucy ill?"
Every day she went to meet the postman, her heart throbbing with eager anxiety, and day after day she went back disappointed. If it had not been for very shame, she would have run away again and gone home, and have asked to be forgiven, but she could not make up her mind to do that. Probably they would not want her at home again, after all the trouble and expense she had been to them. Perhaps her father might even send her back to Hillside again. The shame of that would be unbearable!
She was uncomfortable, too, as well as unhappy. She wanted her clothes, her brush and comb, her books, and all her other belongings. She had, after a fashion, settled into her old room again, but it seemed bare and unhomelike after her pretty one at Cliff Cottage.
Then one day, after long waiting and longing, and hope and disappointment, her father came. For a moment her heart had leaped with the glad wild hope that he had come to take her back with him. Then the sight of the box and parcel he carried had dashed it down again. He had brought her all her possessions.