Queenie sometimes found her cowering in the window recess in the twilight in a perfect stupor of terror, for which she could give no tangible reason. It was dark, and she was afraid, and she did not like to come down into the schoolroom, as she was in disgrace with Fraulein, and so on. Poor pitiful fragments out of a child's life, small every-day tyrannies, little seeds of unkindness dropped into virgin soil, to bring forth perhaps a terrible harvest.
Queenie's passionate love could not shield the little sister; the two could only cling to each other in mute sorrow, each trying to hide from the other how much they suffered.
"I am only tolerably miserable," Emmie would say sometimes, in her droll, unchildish way. "Don't cry, Queenie; you and I and dear old Caleb will live together some day I know, when I am a woman perhaps, and then we shall forget all our troubles," and Emmie would hide the little blackened hand on which Fraulein's ruler had come down so sharply that day, and say nothing of the pain, for fear Queenie should fret. But with all her childish troubles, Emmie suffered less than the elder sister. Queenie would lie awake with aching head and throbbing pulses night after night, revolving schemes for delivering them both from the house of bondage, as she phrased it.
And every night Emmie prayed her poor little prayer that she might not hate Miss Titheridge, and that she and Queenie and Caleb might live together in a little house all by themselves.
Emmie was never weary of describing this ideal house. It must have four rooms and a cupboard, and a little garden in front, where they might grow sweet peas and roses.
"I should hate to be rich; should not you, Queenie?" she would say sometimes. "Caleb would not be able to smoke his long pipes then."
Caleb Runciman was the only friend they knew outside the gates of Granite Lodge, for Queenie had long ago broken with the old acquaintances whom she had known when her father was alive. Some had been offended at her independence and unwillingness to take their advice, others had merely cooled, a few had forgotten the orphans. Queenie was too proud to remind them of her existence; but she and Emmie clung to their old friend Caleb Runciman. He was the old confidential clerk of their uncle, Andrew Calcott, who was still the principal solicitor in Carlisle.
Andrew Calcott had never forgiven his sister her marriage with Frank Marriott. She had chosen between them, he said, and must abide by her decision. The hard, jealous nature had received a secret blow from which it never recovered. In a moment of bitter passion he had uttered a terrible oath, which only poor Emily Calcott and Caleb Runciman heard, that neither she nor any child of hers should ever have a penny of his money.
"It is your money, Andrew, not mine," Emily had answered very sadly and meekly, for after her unfortunate marriage much of her old spirit had died out; "but you should not be so hard on me, my dear," and as she spoke Andrew Calcott's cheek had turned very pale.
"Depend upon it, my dear young lady, he repented of his speech the moment it had passed his lips," Caleb had said more than once to Queenie as he narrated this circumstance, which he was fond of doing with a great deal of dramatic energy. "Aye, that was a terrible oath be took, and enough to blacken any man's soul; no wonder he grows harder every year; and his temper is enough to try a saint, let alone a poor sinner like me, till we daren't answer him for fear of flying in a passion."