The boy, determined to call his life his own, had cut the knot of uncongenial family existence by flight.
Anne was left.
Miss Page turned over the leaves of the exercise book slowly.
On the whole, the child she remembered had kept her resolution fairly well.
“To-day is my birthday. I am thirteen. I am fifteen. I am seventeen.” The words marking another year met her eyes constantly as she fluttered the pages. Several times there was a mention of Hugh. She had heard from him. He was getting on. He hoped some day to be captain of a trading vessel. He had sent her some funny writing-paper from Japan. Another time it was a pressed flower, or some curious seeds from the South Sea Islands.
Once—this was recorded after her seventeenth birthday—he had come home for a week.
“He is nineteen, and so brown and handsome and strong,” was the remark in the journal. “He did not get on well with father. He told him that I ought to go away—that I had no friends, and that my life was very dull. Father was terribly angry. Now Hugh has gone, and I’m wretched—wretched. The house is so quiet. I can hear the clock in the hall ticking even when I’m upstairs in my bedroom. It is raining, and the sky is like lead.”
Anne still turned the leaves. There were big gaps in the journal, but if they had been filled, the word across the page would have been the classic nothing of the diary of Louis XVI.