Madame Le Conte had found the journey very fatiguing. For a few days she utterly refused to stir out of the house, indeed kept her room almost constantly, and would scarcely allow Ethel to go out of her sight.
This was hard on the young girl, for she was burning with impatience to be looking, not upon the rare and beautiful things brought together in the Exposition from all quarters of the earth, but for the loved one of whom she had been in quest for years. Was she there? should she see her? would they recognize each other? Ah, it seemed to her that until that dear one was found she should have no eyes for anything but the multitude of faces presented to her gaze. How could she wait? how endure the slow torture of passing hour after hour, and day after day, shut up with her invalid aunt, listening to her endless fretting and complaining, her reproaches for having brought her away from the home where she was so comfortable, the physician who so thoroughly understood her constitution, wearing her out with the long journey with really no object but a wild-goose chase after the unattainable; for now she was quite convinced that her sister would have been found long since had she been in the land of the living.
Ethel’s patience was sorely tried; her courage also, for it was difficult to keep hope alive in her own breast while compelled to hear an incessant repetition of these doleful prognostications.
But at last there was a rift in the cloud. Madame Le Conte woke one morning feeling rested and refreshed by her night’s sleep, and consequently in tolerable spirits, and Ethel succeeded in coaxing her into her carriage. They drove to and about the park, visited the Main Building, and the Madame spent a couple of hours in a rolling chair, and returned home delighted with her day’s experience.
She had no more reproaches for her niece on the score of having brought her to the great Exhibition almost against her will, but still maintained that there was no reasonable hope of finding her lost sister there.
Yet Ethel was not to be discouraged, but began every day with renewed hope that ere its close her long quest should be ended.
“Mother, mother! and Espy, my own Espy!” her heart kept whispering in the solitude of her own room, and as her eye moved from face to face in the streets, the cars, the buildings and grounds of the Exposition.
She wanted to be there every day, and all day, because there, as it seemed to her, she must find them; but her aunt could not bear the fatigue of constant attendance, and was not willing to be left at home till, to Ethel’s great joy, she came upon a lap-dog the exact counterpart of the lost Frisky in appearance, and with fully as great an aptitude for learning amusing little tricks; and the entertainment Madame Le Conte found in teaching and caressing him was sufficient to induce her to allow her niece occasionally to go out without her.
And those days when she was free from the care imposed by her aunt’s companionship, and at liberty to roam about at her own sweet will, were by far the most enjoyable to Ethel. She liked to lengthen them out, and had often eaten her breakfast and gone long before the Madame awoke from her morning nap, and sometimes the sun was near his setting when she returned.
She was interested in the exhibits, yet few faces of men or women that came within her range of vision escaped her observation. The main object of her coming was never absent from her mind; she pursued her search diligently, but at times physical weariness compelled her to pause and rest awhile.