It was, however, late when she sprang up in the morning, finding that she had overslept herself and too busy in her hurry to think of anything for the first half-hour. Then all that she had seen suddenly flashed over her mind again, and she uttered an involuntary cry. She leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes, and saw again in her mind’s eye the apparition of the previous night. Janet started up again and gave a wild look round her, wondering whether she should not pack up at once and go away. If she had been one of the happy girls who have a mother to go to!—but all the possibilities rushed through her mind in a moment. The explanations she would have to give, the mild suspicion at the vicarage, the milder remonstrances, “But, my dear!—when you were so happy; a face at the window! There might be a dozen ways of explaining it; and what had she to do with it, when all was said?
“Janet, what’s the matter? Janet, let me in. Why, you have your door locked! Janet, Janet, are you ill? You’re late for breakfast and everybody’s down. Ja—anet!”
This was Julia beating a tattoo upon the door.
“There is nothing the matter,” said Janet, faltering; “I have overslept myself. I shall be down directly. Go away, Julia, please.”
“I sha’n’t go away. I’ll wait here for you. I suppose Dolff woke you up coming home in the middle of the night. Make haste, make haste, Janet, or Gussy will say something nasty about people who are so easily put out.”
“Julia, please go away. I am coming; I—have got a headache.”
It was not often that Janet had recourse to a headache, which is always the most ready of excuses. But Julia, though she had been subdued by her governess, was not yet a model of subordination. Janet could hear her seat herself noisily on the other side of the door to wait. She could hear her foot drumming impatiently upon the floor, and then Ju, by way of amusing herself, began to give forth discordantly one of Dolff’s not very lovely songs. It was quite true that Julia was never likely to do much in music. Her voice was something like that of a crow. She chanted Dolff’s song with a very perverted reminiscence of the air, but a perfect memory for the words, which were not admirable. Janet was called back by this performance to the recollection of her duties. It was not possible now to pack up and hurry off. And then she became conscious of a great many threads that held her, as well as this sentinel with her song keeping watch over her door.
They went down together, though Julia did not fail to impress upon the governess a due sense of the fact that she herself had been ready nearly an hour ago.
“You should always get up the moment you’re called, or you are done for,” said Julia; “one says just five minutes more, and when one wakes one finds it’s an hour. I’ve learned all that about the kings, which is rubbish. What do I want with all those old kings? I shall just forget them the moment I’ve said them. I learned it not because I approved of it, but merely to please you.”
“Thank you, my dear, that was a very kind motive,” said Janet, recalling herself to her duties, “but if there is one thing that you ought to know it is the history of your own country. Everybody will tell you that.”