Miss Vyse’s delicate black eyebrows rose in supercilious amazement at this proposal, and Lady Severn at first seemed too astonished to reply. At last she said:
“Really, Miss Freer I suppose I must again give you credit for kindly and well-meant intention; but your must allow me to remind you that I have an ample staff of servants in my household for waiting on the young ladies. You really need not fear they are in any way neglected.”
“Neglected indeed!” repeated Miss Vyse with a silvery laugh at the absurdity of the idea. “Why Emilie sits the whole evening besides Sybil, till her little ladyship goes to sleep. And not a little difficult to please, poor Emilie has found her of late, I can assure you, dear Aunt. Sybil is a child that requires very judicious management, young as she is.”
“She certainly does,” said Marion, quietly, looking at Florence as she spoke. And then, as it appeared that Miss Vyse had exhausted her stock of impertinent sneers and innuendos for the present, she thought it as well to take leave.
Her cheeks burned as she thought quietly over the interview. “Poor Sybil, I have done you more harm than good, I fear!” she said to herself. And then in her genuine anxiety for the suffering and mismanaged child, she unselfishly forgot her own personal annoyance and mortification.
That afternoon as she was sitting with Cissy, Charlie, attended by Thérèse, returned from his stroll in the park. He told her he had met “those two little young ladies you go to play with every morning, May. And the littlest one had red eyes, as if she had been crying,” he added sympathisingly.
“Poor baby!” said Cissy. “She looks horribly ill now and then, Marion. I fancy they are rather rough with her sometimes. She has cowed, cowering look I can’t bear to see in a child’s face.”
All of which added not a little Marion’s uneasiness. An hour or so later when she was alone in her room, Thérèse entered.
“If you please, Mademoiselle,” she said, “the little young lady asked me to give you this, but that no one should see it.”
“This” was a leaf of copy-book paper, on which was written in Sybil’s large, round text hand (the letters shaky and crooked, and the whole bearing marks of being a laborious and painfully accomplished production) the following words: