The nun gripped the other’s two hands passionately, and laid her cheek against them.
“Beatrice, I did not know—I forgot.”
Beatrice stooped and kissed her gently.
The nun loved her tenfold more after that. It had been before a kind of passionate admiration, such as a subject might feel for a splendid queen; but the queen had taken this timid soul in through the palace-gates now, into a little inner chamber intimate and apart, and had sat with her there and shown her everything, her broken toys, her failures; and more than all her own broken heart. And as, after that evening, Margaret watched Beatrice again in public, heard her retorts and marked her bearing, she knew that she knew something that the others did not; she had the joy of sharing a secret of pain. But there was one wound that Beatrice did not show her; that secret was reserved for one who had more claim to it, and could understand. The nun could not have interpreted it rightly.
Mary and Nicholas went back to Great Keynes at the end of January; and Beatrice was out on the terrace with the others to see them go. Jim, the little seven-year-old boy, had fallen in love with her, ever since he had found that she treated him like a man, with deference and courtesy, and did not talk about him in his presence and over his head. He was walking with her now, a little apart, as the horses came round, and explaining to her how it was that he only rode a pony at present, and not a horse.
“My legs would not reach, Mistress Atherton,” he said, protruding a small leather boot. “It is not because I am afraid, or father either. I rode Jess, the other day, but not astride.”
“I quite understand,” said Beatrice respectfully, without the shadow of laughter in her face.
“You see—” began the boy.