"This is the poem you should have learnt yesterday," she said, "though you denied having been told so. Miss Aspinall desires you to take it upstairs to your room and learn it, as you can do perfectly, if you choose, by three o'clock. Then you are to come downstairs to the drawing-room, where you will find her."
"Very well," I said, as I took the book, "I will learn it."
They were going to let me off rather easily, I thought, and possibly, just possibly, if Miss Ledbury was in the drawing-room too and seemed kind, I might ask her to give me leave to write to Mrs. Selwood just to say how very much I would like to see her, and then if I did see her I could tell her what Harriet had said, without risking getting Harriet into trouble.
So I set to work at my French poetry with good will, and long before three o'clock I had learnt it perfectly. There was a clock on the landing half-way down the staircase which struck the quarters and half-hours. I heard the quarter to three strike and then I read the poem right through six times, and after that, closing the book, I said it aloud to myself without one mistake, and then just as the clock began "burr-ing" before striking the hour I made my way quietly down to the drawing-room.
I tapped at the door.
"Come in," said Miss Aspinall.
She was standing beside Miss Ledbury, who was sitting in an arm-chair near the fire. She looked very pale, her face nearly as white as her hair, and it made me feel sorry, so that I stared at her and forgot to curtsey as we always were expected to do on entering a room where any of the governesses were.
"Do you not see Miss Ledbury?" said Miss Aspinall sharply. I felt my cheeks get red, and I turned back towards the door to make my curtsey.
"I—I forgot," I said, and before Miss Aspinall had time to speak again, the old lady held out her hand.