And at this point she actually did fall fainting with a thud on the floor. Miss Clifford, who was giving out the hymn, stopped startled, and some of the girls shrieked. Miss Crow and one of the other teachers carried Beth out by the nearest door.
"Poor little thing!" said Miss Crow, looking pityingly at her drawn white face and purple eyelids. "I'm afraid she's very delicate."
Miss Clifford came also, when prayers were over, and said kind things; and from that time forward Beth received a great deal of sympathetic attention, which did her good, but in no way reconciled her to her imprisonment.
The following term, Beth watched the spring come in at school with infinite yearning. To be out—to be free to sit under the apple-trees and look up through the boughs at the faintly flushed blossom, till the vision and the dream came upon her, and she passed from conscious thought into a higher phase of being—just to do that was her one desire till the petals fell. Then pleasure-boats began to be rowed on the river, rowed or steered by girls no older than herself, in summer dresses delicately fresh; and she, seeing them, became aware of the staleness of her own shabby clothing, and writhed under the rules which would not allow her even to walk on the path overlooking the river, and gaze her fill at it. The creamy white flowers of the great magnolia on the lawn came out, and once she slipped across the grass to peer into them and smell them. She got a bad mark for that, the second she had had.
At preparation that evening she sat so that she could see the river, and watched it idly instead of working; and presently there floated into her mind the rhyme she made when she was a little child at Fairholm—
"The fairy folk are calling me."
Suddenly she caught her breath, her cheeks flushed, her eyes sparkled, her whole aspect changed from apathy to animation, and she laughed.
"What has happened to please you, Beth; you look quite bright?" Miss Bey said, meeting her in the vestibule when preparation was over. Miss Bey was said to favour Beth by some; Beth was said to toady Bey by others; the truth being that they had taken to each other from the first, and continued friends.
"I've got a sort of singing at my heart," Beth answered, sparkling. "The fairy folk are calling me."