Many a grievous task had been thrown upon the tutor in his day, but none cost him more effort than this, of breaking to the children of his enemy the news of their father’s death. But he went through it manfully and ably.
Rosalind, on whom the blow fell hardest, because on her spirit the burden of her father’s cares had lain heaviest, rose, with a heroine’s courage, to the occasion, and earned the tutor’s boundless gratitude by making his task easy. She said little; she understood everything. She remembered nothing but the father’s love—his old caresses and confidences and kindnesses. The tears she shed blotted out all the anxieties and misgivings and heart-sinkings of recent weeks. All that remained was crowded with love.
Tom, dulled and stunned, took the story in gradually, and got used to it as he went along. He came and slept at night in the tutor’s room, and felt how much worse things might have been had it not been for the stalwart protector who put hope and cheer into him, and filled the blank in his heart with sturdier views of life than the boy had ever harboured there before.
As for Jill, for a week all was blackness and darkness to her. She felt deserted—lost. She cried herself to sleep at night, and by day wandered over the house, peeping into her father’s room, and half expecting to see him back. Then her gentle spirit took courage, and she looked up, and her eyes lit with comfort and hope on Mr Armstrong. Everything could not be lost if he was there; and when he sometimes came, and took her little hand in his, and invited her to be his companion in his rides, or sought her out in her lonely walks and made her teach him the haunts of her favourite flowers or read to him from her favourite books, she began to think there was still some joy left on earth.
“Dear Mr Armstrong,” she said one day when, by invitation, she came to make afternoon tea for him in his room, “you are so awfully kind to me! If I was only as old as Rosalind, I would marry you.”
This rather startling declaration took the tutor considerably aback. He laughed and said—
“You are very nice as you are, Jill.”
“You think I’m silly, I know,” said she, “but I’m not. Would you hate me if I was older?”
“I don’t think I could hate you, not even if you were a hundred.”
“I love you ever so much,” said she. “Please don’t believe what Tom said about the Duke. I don’t like him a millionth part as much as you.”