Miss Earle shook her head.
“And he is not spoilt at all!” she exclaimed. “He is not a very quick child, perhaps, but he is painstaking and attentive. He will do very well. And as to obedience and thoughtfulness—why, he has never given me a moment’s trouble.”
This talk had taken place some time ago. Over and over again the young governess had tried to hit upon some way of really impressing her pupils more lastingly, of checking their increasing self-will and heedlessness. For we don’t stand still in character; if we are not improving, it is greatly to be feared we are falling off. Now and then she felt happier, but never for more than a day or two, and this morning—this cold winter morning when she herself had got up long before it was light, to do some extra bookwork, and attend to her invalid sister’s breakfast—this morning was again to bring disappointment.
How cosy and comfortable the schoolroom looked as she came in, and held out her cold hands to the fire!
“Really, they are lucky children,” she thought, as she remembered the bare walls and carpetless floor and meagre grates of the good but far from homelike great school where she herself had been educated. “How good they should be,” as her glance wandered round the pretty, library-like little room. “But perhaps it is not easy to be unselfish if one has everything one wants, every wish gratified!”
Then came the tiresome waiting, the unnecessary waste of time—the footman’s cross face at the door, when she felt obliged to ring and send up a rather peremptory summons, a summons only responded to by Jasper, burdened with Chrissie’s far from satisfactory message—followed, just when Miss Earle was getting interested in the little boy’s reading, by a bang at the door and the younger girl’s noisy entrance, for she had overtaken Leila on the staircase and insisted on a race, in which, of course, she had been the winner.
“Chrissie!” exclaimed Miss Earle, surprised and remonstrant. “My dear child, you should not burst into the room in that way. It is too startling.”
“Yes, do speak to her, Miss Earle,” said Leila, in a complaining tone, with which their governess at one time would have had more sympathy than she now felt. For truly the little girls’ quarrels were almost always “six of one and half-a-dozen of the other.”
“She nearly knocked me downstairs and I was coming quite quietly.”
“And in the meantime neither of you has said good-morning to me, and it is eighteen minutes past the half-hour,” Miss Earle continued. “Besides which, you know you should be here before I come, with your books and all ready.”