“Oh, is that you, Miss Dora? Come in and see my lady, and cheer her up. She’s not in the best of spirits to-night.”
“Neither am I—in the best of spirits,” said Dora.
“You!” cried Gilchrist, with what she herself would have called a “skreigh” of laughter. She added sympathetically: “You’ll maybe have been getting a scold from your papaw".
“My father never scolds,” said Dora, with dignity.
“Bless me! but that’s the way when there’s but wan child,” said Miss Bethune’s maid: “not always, though,” she added, with a deep sigh that waved aloft her own cap-strings, and caught Dora’s hair like a breeze. The next moment she opened the door and said, putting her head in: “Here’s Miss Dora, mem, to cheer you up a bit: but no’ in the best of spirits hersel’".
“Bless me!” repeated Miss Bethune from within: “and what is wrong with her spirits? Come away, Dora, come in.” Both mistress and maid had, as all the house was aware, curious modes of expressing themselves, which were Scotch, though nobody was aware in Bloomsbury how that quality affected the speech—in Miss Bethune’s case at least. The lady was tall and thin, a large framework of a woman which had never filled out. She sat in a large chair near the fire, between which and her, however, a screen was placed. She held up a fan before her face to screen off the lamp, and consequently her countenance was in full shadow. She beckoned to the girl with her hand, and pointed to a seat beside her. “So you are in low spirits, Dora? Well, I’m not very bright myself. Come and let us mingle our tears.”
“You are laughing at me, Miss Bethune. You think I have no right to feel anything.”
“On the contrary, my dear. I think at your age there are many things that a girl feels—too much; and though they’re generally nonsense, they’re just as disagreeable as if they were the best of sense. Papa a little cross?”
“Why should you all think anything so preposterous? My father is never cross,” cried Dora, with tears of indignation in her eyes.
“The better for him, my dear, much the better for him,” said Miss Bethune; “but, perhaps, rather the worse for you. That’s not my case, for I am just full of irritability now and then, and ready to quarrel with the tables and chairs. Well, you are cross yourself, which is much worse. And yet I hear you had one of your grand boxes to-day, all full of bonnie-dies. What a lucky little girl you are to get presents like that!”