‘And are you happy?’ Greta said. ‘Oh, Joyce! I remember how you used to fancy all manner of things. You would not have been surprised if you had turned out to be a princess—like Queen Mary’s daughter, who was “unknown to history."’
‘If there ever was such a person,’ said schoolmistress Joyce. ‘Yes, I think I was quite prepared to be a princess.’
‘It would have been much more troublesome than this, and not half so nice, I think. To have had that horrible Bothwell for a father, or some one else as dreadful, instead of delightful Colonel Hayward.’
‘My father,’ said Joyce, with a little flush and stir of feeling which was always called forth by his name, ‘is better—than anything I ever could have dreamed.’
‘Then why are you not happy?’ cried Greta, going direct to the heart of the matter, as children do.
‘But perhaps I am happy,’ said Joyce, with a little sigh, followed by a smile. ‘To be happy is a strange thing: it is not at your own will, nor because you are well off, and have everything you can want. It is just for nothing, and comes when it pleases. And life is very confusing. There are so many things to think of that I never thought of before. How to please them—and I always used to please, just because it was me. And sometimes I think they are ashamed.’
‘Ashamed, Joyce!’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not of me, as me: but because of what I was. You used all to say pretty things to me, Miss Greta, about the fine work I was doing,—about the use I was to the children—even to the country,’ Joyce added, with a light in her eyes.
‘Miss Greta, Joyce! is that like the friends we are? I shall call you Miss Hayward if you say that again.’
Joyce turned upon her with a sudden flash, raising her head with an involuntary movement that looked like disdain. ‘See now,’ she said, ‘you yourself! You never said that when I was Joyce Matheson, the schoolmistress at Bellendean. And yet you all praised me, and said I was doing a good work. I am doing no work nor anything here. I am just a cumberer of the ground. They don’t know what to do with me, though they want to be very kind. And I don’t know what to do with myself. But you never said that to me in the old time.’