"They are so unkind to me," she wailed, "so very unkind. Wealthy never slapped me before. She has no right to slap me. I'll never kiss Wealthy again,—never. O-h, she was so unkind"—
"O-h!" echoed back the wood in a hollow tone. Eyebright jumped.
"It's like a voice," she thought. "I'll go somewhere else. It isn't nice just here. I don't like it."
So she went back a little way to the edge of the forest, where the trees were less thick, and between their stems she could see the village below. Here she felt safer than she had been when in the thick wood. She threw herself down in a comfortable hollow at the foot of an oak, and, half sitting, half lying, began to think over her wrongs.
"I guess if I was dead they'd be sorry," she reflected. "They'd hunt and hunt for me, and not know where I was. And at last they'd come up here, and find me dead, with a tear on my cheek, and then they'd know how badly they had made me feel, and their hearts would nearly break. I don't believe father would ever smile again. He'd be like the king in the 'Second Reader':—
'But waves went o'er his son's bright hair,
He never smiled again.'
Only, I'm a daughter, and it would be leaves and not waves! Mother, she'd cry and cry, and as for that old Wealthy"—but Eyebright felt it difficult to imagine what Wealthy would do under these circumstances. Her thoughts drifted another way.
"I might go into a convent instead. That would be better, I guess. I'd be a novice first, with a white veil and a cross and a rosary, and I'd look so sweet and holy that all the other children,—no, there wouldn't be any other children,—never mind!—I'd be lovely, anyhow. But I'd be a Protestant always! I wouldn't want to be a Catholic and have to kiss the Pope's old toe all the time! Then by and by I should take that awful black veil. Then I could never come out any more—not ever! And I should kneel in the chapel all the time as motionless as a marble figure. That would be beautiful." Eyebright had never been able to sit still for half an hour together in her life, but that made no difference in her enjoyment of this idea. "The abbess will be beautiful, too, but stern and unrelenting, and she'll say 'Daughters' when she speaks to us nuns, and we shall say 'Holy Mother' when we speak to her. It'll be real nice. We shan't have to do any darning, but just embroidery in our cells and wax flowers. Wealthy'll want to come in and see me, I know, but I shall just tell the porter that I don't want her, not ever. 'She's a heretic,' I shall say to the porter, and he'll lock the door the minute he sees her coming. Then she'll be mad! The Abbess and Mère Généfride"—Eyebright had just read for the fourth time Mrs. Sherwood's exciting novel called "The Nun," so her imaginary convent was modelled exactly after the one there described—"the abbess and Mère Généfride will always be spying about and listening in the passage to hear what we say, when we sit in our cells embroidering and telling secrets, but me and my Pauline—no, I won't call her Pauline—Rosalba—sister Rosalba—that shall be her name—we'll speak so low that she can't hear a word. Then we shall suspect that something strange is taking place down in the cellar,—I mean the dungeons,—and we'll steal down and listen when the abbess and the bishop and all of them are trying the sister, who has a bible tied on her leg!" Here Eyebright gave an enormous yawn. "And—if—the—mob—does come—Wealthy—will be sure to—sure to—"
But of what we shall never know, for at this precise moment Eyebright fell asleep.
