"I must make some other arrangement after Christmas," she thought. "Esther doesn't seem happy where she is."
If she had known how much of Esther's unhappiness was due to Marie's unkindness, her indignation would have made itself felt. Marie meantime poured forth her heart on cream note-paper to her friend Marguerite Archington, bewailing the cruel fate which separated them, and doomed her to the companionship of Esther Jones.
Esther's natural timidity was increased by Marie's treatment. At first she made feeble efforts to converse, but finding herself continually repressed, gradually ceased from her endeavors to make friends with Marie.
Not only her timidity, but her nervousness, as well, grew on her. She began to be startled at every sudden sound.
Now Marie was a girl without "nerves," in the ordinary sense of the word, and could not understand or sympathize with those who are constituted differently. She really believed poor Esther's nervousness to be affectation, and had no patience with it.
"She's been coddled all her life, evidently," she reflected, "until now she expects every one to pet her on account of her foolish nervous tricks. She needs a process of hardening."
If Marie had not really believed this, I do not think she would have put into execution a plan which suggested itself to her the week before Thanksgiving.
It was a cruel scheme, and even though she assured herself that it was really for Esther's good and that it would cure the nervousness, I think she was at heart a little ashamed of herself all the time.
| At the western end of the third floor there was a stairway leading up to a room at the top of the building, which was occasionally used as an observatory. A telescope was mounted there, but, as it was not very powerful, the astronomy classes generally used one at the private residence of their professor instead. |
The room, being so seldom used, had become a receptacle for old lumber of all sorts. Girls are so fond of exercising their imagination that it is not strange that they gradually invested the garret-like room at the top of the house with the reputation of being "haunted."