Still, though the next morning was dreary and stormy in the extreme, Claudia looked and felt better than for some time past.
“You don’t look as if ghosts or anything else had been troubling you,” said Lady Mildred; “but it is far too stormy for Kelpie this morning. You must have the brougham.”
And Claudia, while she thanked her, smiled to herself as she wondered what her aunt would have said to her visit to the tower room the night before.
Chapter Ten.
Jerry’s Appeal.
It was now very near Christmas, which promised this year to be what people are fond of calling “an old-fashioned” one. Snow had already fallen, though not to any great extent, though the weather-wise were prophesying that there was already more to come.
Charlotte Waldron was working harder at her lessons than she had ever yet done, and with a sort of feverish eagerness and absorption that was new to her. She tried to some extent to conceal her intense anxiety from her mother, perhaps because she felt instinctively that Mrs Waldron would have told her that she was allowing the spirit of ambition and emulation to carry her too far, especially if the whole of her motives had been confessed. She would not allow herself to acknowledge them; she would have been indignant with any one who had put them into words and faced her with their unloveliness. And as “none are so blind as those who won’t see,” she remained self-deceived, and in a sense self-satisfied.
Jerry, as usual, was her chief and indeed at this time her only confidant. And even to him she did not say very much, but what she did say startled and impressed the sensitive, sympathising nature of the boy far more than Charlotte had any idea of.