"Oh! then you don't like to speak of it! Dear me! I certainly wont, then."
Yet this rattle-brained girl has no real ill-nature; and it is surprising what a number of such well-meaning people go blundering about society, inflicting cheerful wounds in all directions by mere reason of their bluntness and lack of all delicacy of feeling.
But it is by no means the first time the sensibilities of Adèle have been touched to the quick. She is approaching that age when they ripen with marvellous rapidity. There is never an evening now at that cheerful home of the Elderkins—lighted up as it is with the beaming smiles of that Christian mother, Mrs. Elderkin—but there sweeps over the mind of the poor girl, at some interval in the games or the chat, a terrible sense of some great loss she has suffered, of which she knows not the limits,—a cruel sense of isolation in which she wanders, and on which comes betimes the recollection of a father's kindly face, that in the growing distance makes her isolation seem even more appalling.
Rose, good soul, detects these humors by a keen, girlish instinct, and, gliding up to her, passes her arm around her,—
"What is it now, Adèle, dear?"
And she, looking down at her, (for Adèle was the taller by half a head,) says,—
"What a good mother you have, Rose!"
"Only that!"—and Rose laughs gleefully for a moment, when, bethinking herself where the secret grief lay, her sweet face is overcast in an instant, and reaching up her two hands, she draws down the face of Adèle to hers, and kisses her on either cheek.
Phil, who is at a game of chess with Grace, pretends not to see this side demonstration; but his next move is to sacrifice his only remaining castle in the most needless manner.
Dame Tourtelot, too, has pressed her womanly prerogative of knowing whatever could be known about the French girl who comes occasionally with Miss Eliza to her tea-drinkings, and who, with a native taste for music, is specially interested in the piano of Miss Almira.