Her anger was always fleeting as a puff of smoke.

But Louise merely shrugged her shoulders and looked vaguely at her again. Then she returned to her work.

Alwynne, walking up and down the room watched her intently as she bent over the Latin grammar. She was wrinkling her brows over a piece of prose that she had already construed at the previous lesson, and with an ease that had astonished Alwynne. She looked bewildered and put her hand to her head again. Her efforts to recall her wandering thoughts were patent and almost physical in their intensity; her small hand hovered, contracting and relaxing, like a baby catching at b.u.t.terflies.

Alwynne was puzzled by her. The child was sincere: but obviously something momentous had happened, and was still occupying her, to the exclusion of all else. Alwynne wished that she had been less hasty: she felt that she should not have checked her.

She stood a moment beside her, reading what she had written. It was scarcely legible, and made no sense. She put a hand on her shoulder--

"Louise, you are writing nonsense. What is it? Tell me what the matter is?"

Louise laid down her pen, gave her a quick, shy smile, hesitated uncertainly, then, to Alwynne's dismay, collapsed on the low desk in a fit of wild, hysterical crying.

Alwynne always shed the mistress in emergency.

She whipped her arms about the child, and, sitting down, gathered her into her lap. She felt how the little, thin body was wrenched and shaken by the sobs it did not attempt to control, but she said nothing, only held it comfortingly tight.

Slowly the paroxysm subsided, and the words came, jerky, fragmentary, faint. Alwynne bent close to catch them.

Louise was so sorry ... she was all right now ... Miss Durand must think her crazy. No--no--nothing wrong ... it was the other way round ... she was so happy that it frightened her ... she was madly happy ... she had been in heaven all day ... it was too wonderful to tell any one about ... even Miss Durand.... Miss Hartill--no one could ever know what Miss Hartill was.... She had been so good to her--so wonderful.... She had made Louise so happy that she was frightened ... she couldn't believe it was possible to be so madly happy.... That was all.... Yes, it had made her cry--the pure happiness.... Wasn't it silly? Only she was so dreadfully tired.... It had hurt her head trying to do the Latin--because she was so tired.... Yes, she had had headaches lately.... But she didn't care--it was worth it, to please Miss Hartill.... It was queer that being so happy should make her want to cry; it was comical, wasn't it?

She began to laugh as she spoke, with tears br.i.m.m.i.n.g over her lashes, and for a few moments was inclined to be hysterical again.

But Alwynne's firm grasp and calm voice was too much for Louise's will, weakened by emotion and fatigue; she was soon coaxed and hushed into quiet again, and after lying pa.s.sively for a while in Alwynne's arms, fell into the sudden light sleep of utter exhaustion.

Alwynne, rocking her gently, sat on in the darkening room, without a thought of the pa.s.sage of time; puzzling over the problem in her arms.

She was too ignorant and inexperienced to understand Louise's outburst, or to realise the dangerous strain that the child's sensibilities were undergoing but the touch of the little figure, clinging, nestling to her, stirred her. She was vaguely aware that something--somehow--was amiss. Innocently she rejoiced that Clare was being kind to Louise, that the child was so happy and content; but the complaint of fatigue, the frequent headaches, troubled her. She would speak to Elsbeth.... Perhaps the child needed a tonic? Elsbeth would know....

She glanced down. How different people looked asleep.... She had never before realised how young Louise was. What was she? Thirteen? But what a baby she looked, with her thin, child's shape and small, clutching hands.... It was the long-lashed lids that did it, hiding the beautiful eyes that were so much older, as she saw now, than the rest of Louise.

With her soul asleep, Louise looked ten, and a frail little ghost of ten, at that.

Alwynne frowned. She supposed Clare Hartill realised how young Louise was, was right in allowing her to work so hard? But Clare knew all about girls, and what did she, Alwynne, know? After all Louise had never flagged before.... It was probably the usual end of term fatigue--and of course it was necessarily an unusually stiff three months for her....

She needed a holiday.... Next term would come more easily to her, poor little impetuous Louise.... Alwynne realised that she was growing fond of the child.

Suddenly she heard footsteps in the corridor, and her own name in Clare's impatient accents. Louise, too, roused at the sound, and, jerking herself upright, slid from Alwynne's lap to her feet, as the door opened and the light was switched on with a snap. Clare stood in the doorway.

Serenely Alwynne rose, smoothing the creases in her dress, while with the other hand she steadied Louise, swaying and blinking in the strong light. Clare's sharp eyes appreciated her calm no less than the tear-stains on Louise's cheek; she guessed distortedly at the situation.

She bit her lip. She found nothing to be annoyed at, yet she was not pleased.

"Alwynne! I've been hunting for you high and low. I thought you were coming home to tea with me."

Alwynne beamed at her.

"Of course! And do you know, I forgot to tell Elsbeth. Isn't it disgraceful? But I'm coming."

She turned to Louise.

"My dear, run along home, and get to bed early; you look dreadfully tired. Doesn't she, Miss Hartill?"

But Clare was already in the pa.s.sage.

Alwynne hurried after her, with a last cheerful nod, and Louise heard the echo of their footsteps die away in the distance.

Still dazed and heavy with sleep, her thoughts obscured and chaotic, she sat down again stupidly at her desk in the alcove of the window. She leaned her forehead against the cold pane and looked out.

It was a wild night. The wind soughed and shrieked in the bare trees: the rain tore past in gusts; the lamp-post at the corner was mirrored in the wet pavement, like a moon on an oily sea.

Louise pushed open the cas.e.m.e.nt. The wind lulled as she did so, and she lent out. The air, at least, was mild, and a faint back-wash of rain sprayed soothingly upon her hot cheeks and swollen eyes.

Slowly her thoughts shaped themselves. So the day was over--the happiest day she had ever had.... She thought G.o.d was very wonderful to have made such a woman as Miss Hartill. She sent Him a hasty little prayer of thanks. But she had been very foolish that afternoon.... She could not understand it now.... She hoped Miss Durand would not tell Miss Hartill.... Miss Hartill had been in a great hurry! Was that why she had not said good-night to her? But such a little word. She wondered why Miss Hartill had not said good-night to her....

The front door below the window creaked and opened. Louise peered downwards. Miss Durand and Miss Hartill came down the steps sheltering under one umbrella, talking. Their voices floated up.

"I hope you don't spoil her, Alwynne? Yes, I know----" Alwynne was murmuring friendly adjectives. "But a mistress is in a peculiar position. You should not let yourself be too familiar----" A gust of wind and rain whirling down the road bore away the rest of the sentence.

Louise shut the window. She shivered a little as she gathered up her books.

Her happiest day was over.

CHAPTER VIII

A week before Christmas Alwynne began to wonder how the day itself should be spent, or rather, if her plans for the spending would ever pa.s.s Elsbeth's censorship. She was doubtful. For the last two or three years Christmas had been to them a rock of collision.

"The pity of it!" thought Alwynne. Once it had been the event, the crowning glory, the very reason of the ending year. A year, indeed, had always presented itself to her in advance as a wide country through which she must make her way, to reach the hostel, Christmas, hidden in the mists of time, on its further border. She had the whole map of the land in her mind, curiously vivid and distinct. She had never consciously devised the picture; it had, from the first, presented itself complete and unalterable. She stood, on New Year's Day, at the entrance of a country lane which ran between uneven hedges through a varying countryside of fields and woods and heatherland. Each change in the surroundings represented a month, the smaller differences the weeks and days. She went down this winding lane as the days went by, in slow content. January was a silent expanse of high tableland, snow-bound to the horizon. Winding down hill through the sodden gra.s.sland of the bare February country, where she lighted on nothing but early parsnip fronds and sleepy celandine buds in the dripping wickery hedges, she pa.s.sed at last into the wood of March, a wood of pollard hazels and greening oaks and bramble-guarded dingles, where the anemones grew, and the first primroses. She slipped and slithered in and out of mossy leaf-pits, and the briars clawed her hair and pinafore, as she robbed the primrose clumps with wet, reddened fingers. The wind shrieked overhead and wrestled wildly with the bare branches, but beyond there was blue sky and a drift of cloud. But, unawares, she would always head through the wood to where the trees grew thinner and dash out at last, through a mist of pale cuckoo-pint, into the cowslip field that was April.

The path ran on through May and June between fields of ox-eye daisies and garden roses, always down hill, till she tumbled into August, the deep hot valley. There she found the sea.

With September the road lifted steadily, growing stony and ever steeper.

It wound on ahead of her like a silver thread through a brocade of red and gold and purple, that was heather and bracken and beech. But the beech blossoms could never be gathered; they fell apart into a shower of dull leaves, and left her with a branch of bare twigs in her hand. The briony berries that she twisted into wreaths stained her straw hat with their black, evil juice; even the manna-like old-man's-beard smelled sour and rotten. The decaying, witchlike beauty of the season tricked and frightened her; autumn was a hard hill to climb.

But far away, on the summit of that difficult hill, stood a house. An old house, gaily bricked, dressed in ivy, with a belfry from which carols rang out unceasingly. It was always night-time where it stood and cheerful lights were set in every window. Alwynne never saw the house till she had turned the bend of the road into November; then it faced her suddenly and she would wave to the distant windows with a thrill of excitement, and quicken her steps, with the goal of the journey in sight at last. There was yet a weary climb before it was reached; every day of December was a boulder, painfully beclambered. But she would come to the gates at last, and tear up the frosty drive, from the shadow of whose shrubberies Jacob Marley peered and clanked at her and ghosts of Christmas turkeys gobbled horribly, to the open holly-hung doorway where Santa Claus, authentic in beard and dressing-gown, welcomed her with Elsbeth's voice. Followed stay-at-home days of delirious merry-making, from which she awoke a week later, to find herself, her back to a closed door, a spent cracker in her hand, looking out again, eager and a little wistful, across the white untrodden plain of yet another January.

But ever the next Christmas beckoned her anew.

To Elsbeth, too, Christmas was the day of delights, and Alwynne the queen of it. To Elsbeth, too, the pleasure of it began many weeks earlier in the secret fashioning of quaint gifts and surprises, and the antic.i.p.ation of the small niece's delight in them. Elsbeth would have cheerfully cut off one of her slim fingers if Alwynne had happened to covet it. The childless woman loved Alwynne--the child in Alwynne she worshipped.

But though the delight of actual motherhood was denied Elsbeth, she was spared none of its chagrins.

Stooping for years to a child's level, she was cruelly shaken when Alwynne, suddenly and inexplicably, as it always seems, grew up. It took Elsbeth almost as many years to straighten herself again. Years when Alwynne, in the arrogance of her enterprising youth, thought that Elsbeth was sometimes awfully childish. She supposed that she was growing old; she used not to be like that....

Thereafter, each Christmas, challenging comparison as it did with the memory-mellowed charm of its forerunners, emphasised the change that had taken place. Yearly the ideal Christmas lured them to the old observances; yearly the reality satisfied them less.

Elsbeth still sat up half the night on Christmas Eve, at work upon the little tree. Alwynne still planned gorgeous and laborious presents for her aunt. Elsbeth still filled a stocking (out-size) with tip-toe secrecy, and Alwynne, at sixteen, still ran across in her dressing-gown, and curled up on Elsbeth's bed to unpack it.