“You don’t.”
“Yes, I do. It would be very much pleasanter for us to have a little independent crib of our own, where we should be able to indulge ourselves and each other, and get away from all the little frictions of life in a family where things are not done quite in the way we have been used to. But it would be like running away from what seems to have been given us to bear; and I expect we should find we soon had a big new crop of worries and bothers, quite as big as the old ones. So I think, Sheila, we will not force things ourselves. We will go back to Uncle Tom’s, and wait and see what turns up. We will both try and be patient, and do what is right, never minding whether or not it is what we like best ourselves. We must try and learn the lesson of not pleasing ourselves always. You know Who set us the example of that?”
Sheila subsided upon the floor, and laid her head on Oscar’s knee, taking his hand between hers.
“You are getting so good, Oscar,” she said, “I am almost afraid of you. You are not ill, are you?”
“Ill? No. Why do you ask?”
“Because you don’t look well, and when people are so very very good, one sometimes fancies they are——”
Sheila paused, and Oscar said with a little tone of mirth in his quiet voice—
“I am not going to die of goodness yet, Sheila! You need not be afraid on that score.”
It was with a good deal of shrinking that Sheila prepared to face the Cossarts on the morrow. She knew that they would by this time have received the letter her aunt must have written, and that Mrs. Cossart would not have drawn her picture with a very strict regard to truth. She would have thought more of justifying her precipitate action than of anything else; and Sheila was terribly sensitive where Ronald Dumaresq was concerned, and felt as though any mention of his name would be worse than the cut of a whip. And her cousins were not sensitive on these points. They would be almost certain to cross-question her and make a joke of everything.
It needed all her courage and resolution to face the meeting; but when they drew up at the door and were met by Ray in the passage, it was not of Sheila’s sudden return that the whole house was thinking. Indeed Ray only gave her a rather hurried kiss, warm and sisterly, but distinctly hasty, and then turned to Oscar and took him by the shoulders, bringing him into the strong light of the window.