I stopped short after this, thinking I had put a splendid finishing-touch to my out-spoken determination. I do not know whether I expected Mr. Dalton to faint with fright and surprise on hearing such a daring declaration from me. If I did, I must have been sadly disappointed when I detected a shadow of that hovering smile flitting back across his features, and heard him ask in a provoking tone.

"Away! Where, Amey?"

The incisive ridicule implied in these words urged me to a still more reckless defiance, and affecting a very cutting sneer I answered--

"Perhaps you think I am not in earnest, Mr. Dalton, but _you'll see!_ Remember I have told you that I am wretched, and it's all _her_ fault When I am gone you can tell papa that 'twas all her doing, that she hated me and I hated her, and I thought 'twas better to go away--and I _will_ go away Mr. Dalton"--I emphasized--"away into the bush, and if no one comes to take me I'll do like the babes in the woods, and the little birds will cover me with nice green leaves when I'm dead."

There were no tears now, I had worked myself into a dry rage and could look my monitor full in the face; my little arms were crossed with a determination worthy of maturer years, and I was grand with the conviction of having frightened this big man into a belief of my rambling threats. I was a little disconcerted, however, when he looked at me seriously and said in a slow measured tone:

"Then _this_ is not the Amey Hampden that I have known all along. She would never have said such ugly things as those I have just heard; she was not a selfish little girl, and would fear to displease her friends or those who loved her."

He was winning me over, but before I yielded I must aim another arrow.

"I guess you're right after all Mr. Dalton" I answered swinging one kid shoe in an aimless indifferent manner, and looking purposely away at the leg of the rustic table, "cause _this_ Amey Hampden hasn't got any friends, or any one to love her, either."

"Are you telling the truth now, Amey? Look at me and repeat that," he interrupted quickly.

I wished to be very brave, and turned my eyes full upon him; he took my chin in his large, warm palm and looked steadily into my face for a moment. I was conquered, and he saw it; he stooped and kissed me, and we both laughed as I said

"Well; you never _said_ you were my friend."

He arose, and taking me by the hand, we strolled over the lawn and pa.s.sed into the library together.

Ernest Dalton was nearly twenty-five years my senior!

CHAPTER III.

It is now an old and respected adage that "coming events cast their shadows before," and had I only been at all alive to the growing changes in the routine of our daily life, I might easily have detected the outline of some hovering shadow which was heralding the advent of some strange, and hitherto undreamt of interruption, into the questionably peaceful monotony of my early career.

One fine August morning, some weeks after my tragic interview with Mr.

Dalton, I sat on the step of the outer kitchen stairway, which led into an artistically cultivated vegetable patch at the rear of the house, absorbed in the intensely interesting occupation of cutting some elegantly-coloured ladies out of a superannuated fashion-plate.

On the step above me was my garden hat, inverted, into which I deposited my paper "swells" according as I trimmed them: on the step below me sat old Hannah, sc.r.a.ping some new potatoes, according to her established principles of economy. We both worked diligently and silently for awhile, and then old Hannah, pausing with a half cleaned potatoe in one hand and a knife dripping with water in the other, looked at me seriously for a moment and said half meditatively:

"Well now; arn't you the baby, Miss Amelia, to spend your time over that foolish stuff; fitter for you be knitting a little garter, or hemming a little handkerchief for yourself."

I smiled, and without raising my eyes from the critical curve of my paper lady's bustle, which I was then rounding most carefully, I answered:

"I suppose I might do better with my time, Hannah, if I knew how, but as I don't, I'd rather be doing this than nothing."

"It says a lot for Miss Forty, then," Hannah put in indignantly, "to think you're goin' into your teens before long and that's all you know how to do!"

"Miss de Fortier did not come to teach me sewing and knitting, Hannah.

She taught me lessons."

"Lessons how are you! And what's become of them if she did? Oh, its a fine way children are brought up in this country," the old woman went on half in soliloquy; "a bit of this and a bit of that and not much of either. I pity the housekeepers ye'll make yet. G.o.d help the poor men that are waiting for ye. Many's the missing b.u.t.ton and broken sock they'll have to put up with!"

"Well, Hannah," I interrupted, beginning an impromptu justification and defence--but Hannah was destined never to have her conviction shaken, for just then I heard a sharp rapping at the library window, and gathering up the fragments of my fashion-plate in my linen pinafore, I ran outside and looked towards that end of the house. My father was standing at the open cas.e.m.e.nt, and beckoned me to go to him. Whether from the novelty of the occurrence, or the instinctive awe in which I stood of my father, I immediately let go the margin of my pinafore, dropping scissors and ladies and all, in a most brusque and heedless manner, and hastened into the library, while I was smoothing out the wrinkled folds of my clean, starched ap.r.o.n.

In my excitement I had forgotten to wonder at the strange circ.u.mstance, but when my little hand clutched the great k.n.o.b of the library door and turned it, and when the placid countenance of my step-mother looked up at me from a comfortable easy-chair at the opposite side of the room, I felt that some awful moment had dawned on my existence. With as much nerve and self-control as a child usually displays on such an occasion, I closed the door behind me and walked towards the window where my father was standing.

He was clad in a gown of ruby cashmere, and wore an expensive cap and slippers to match; the girdle was untied, leaving the rich chenille ta.s.sels to trail almost upon the ground, and the velvet fronts so elaborately embroidered were crushed rudely aside by his hands, which were thrust into his breeches pockets.

When I came up to where he stood, he turned slowly around and viewed me in my diminutive entirety from head to foot. Unable to restrain her love of interference any longer, my step-mother here advised me parenthetically to "stand up straight," sustaining her reasons for thus counselling me by the cheerful intelligence that "I was disposed to be round-shouldered any way, and should do my best to check the deformity." I raised my head and lowered my shoulders in silent obedience to this meek injunction, preparing myself inwardly for an attack of a much less generous and still more personal nature than this. What was my surprise when my father, taking a step towards me, and placing one hand half affectionately on my head, remarked in a rather playful and, for him, quite a frivolous tone:

"Oh, we none of us go straight to Heaven, do we, Amey? We must bend our shoulders and droop our heads a little first."

I was grateful to him for coming thus to my rescue, although I understood neither the meaning of his ambiguous words, nor the motives which prompted him to use them. I see more clearly through them now, however.

"But," he continued, taking me by the hand and leading me towards the lounge behind him, "this is not exactly what I want to talk to you about; I admit that you are backward in many respects, but that is not altogether your fault."

I was looking at him with riveted attention while he spoke, sublimely innocent of the import of a single word he uttered.

"And," he added, in a slower and more directly communicative tone, as he disengaged his hand from mine and leaned his arm on the back of the lounge behind me, "I have decided to send you to a first-rate school, Amey, where you will have a chance to perfect yourself in every way; do you think you will like to go away to school?" he asked, so timidly that one would have thought my opinion on the matter could have some little value.

Before I had time to master this question with all its ponderous possibilities, my step-mother observed obligingly,

"Of course she would like it, Alfred, and even if she wouldn't you know she ought to go; Amelia herself knows," she continued, without looking at me, "that she is quite a dunce for her age, and will need to work very hard in order to make up for lost time. So, your father and I have decided," she added conclusively, "that you shall go to boarding-school, Amelia, as early next month as you can be got ready."

The word "boarding-school" was to me, perhaps, the vaguest and most indefinite in the English language. I knew that such places existed, but it had never entered into my juvenile conception of things to a.s.sociate them in any way with my present or future career. In my dreamings I had often pictured myself as grown up and matured; I had even pictured my womanhood so far as tying two of Hannah's long ap.r.o.ns about my waist, one in front and the other behind, and with a shawl thrown cornerwise over my shoulders, to fancy myself a lady in "long dresses" like the "Miss Hartmanns" that called upon my step-mother.

I had wished to be the wife of a great, rich man, that I might do as I pleased with myself, and be "somebody" with my airs and graces, but I had never met such an obstacle in the long rambles of my reverie as "going to school." When, therefore, the subject was thrust upon me without any preparation, I felt as if I had seen a ghost and was told to go and speak to it, that it wouldn't harm me; and, lest the reader should attribute my emotion to a more natural, and, I dare say, becoming sentiment, I will confess that it was owing purely to the nervous shock which I sustained at the unexpected mention of so important a change in my life, that my eyes filled up with tears, and that I gave way to other ambiguous signs of appropriate agitation.

All this, however, was neither here nor there, so far as the fixed intention of my parents was concerned to dispose of me for an indefinite period of time, and within three weeks of that day when the announcement was first made to me, I was crying myself to sleep in a narrow little bed, hundreds of miles away from my father's house.

Perhaps there was not another girl among the three hundred boarders of Notre Dame Abbey, that had such little reason to be home-sick as Amey Hampden; and yet--G.o.d help us! into what strange moods we are p.r.o.ne to fall! When a wide-spreading distance had thrust itself between me and the home of my early days, I could not help feeling that, after all, my heart had tendrils like other people's, and that this separation had torn them rudely away from the objects, few or many, worthy or unworthy, around which they had twined with a clinging firmness.

The bare, white-washed walls of this strange dormitory brought out in touching relief the cosy corners of my own little room at home, and the strict and rigid discipline, to which I felt I never could conform, made me look back with a hopeless regret upon the wandering, aimless hours I had spent unfettered, before I became a pupil of this bleak inst.i.tution.

I did not know then, as I know now, that it is not the house which makes the home; that white-washed walls and painted floors may melt into artistic beauty, where glows the never smouldering fire of Christian love; and I have searched the world in vain for many a year, among riches and luxuries and comforts, but I have never had the smallest glimpse of that same abiding, enduring and self-sacrificing love which presided over me, waking or sleeping, smiling or weeping, during my happy, yet transient sojourn, in that distant Abbey of Notre Dame.

Within its walls my childhood melted into girlhood, and my girlhood into womanhood, and still, when I look out over the tree-tops, away beyond the misty mountains in the west, towards the spot where this my truly happiest home lies nestled, when with one sweeping stroke of my active pen I cancel twenty years of my life, and am back again a laughing, careless girl among my school companions, what is time to me? Only a huge and ugly shadow flitting between me and all that I have ever loved or cherished! A shadow, however, that flickers and bounds away, when, with her magic lantern, memory floods the vista of the past, with the light of "other days."

When I returned to my father's house to spend a short vacation among my earliest friends, I had entered upon my sixteenth year. I had of course, in the interval, been visited alternately by my father and step-mother, who kept me quite _au courant_ of all that transpired in their fashionable world in my absence.

I had received photographs of my interesting half brother, which made me familiar with the changes wrought in him physically, by time; but all this had no satisfaction for me, who would rather one glimpse of old Hannah's frilled cap, or one peep through the narrow panes of Ella Wray's humble cottage, than all the spicy intelligences of the doings and sayings of possibly great people, for whom, however, I cared but very little.

At the close of our summer session of that year my father brought me home for a visit of three months. I had grown considerably, and for a person of tolerably good health, was very slender, which gave me the appearance of being yet taller than I was, and I felt an instinctively spiteful satisfaction in the consciousness that I had quite overcome any tendencies I might ever have had towards being round-shouldered; the regular calisthenic exercises which we went through at the convent had made a decided change for the better in my personal appearance.

I was not long at home before I detected a resolution on the part of my step-mother to adopt a new, and altogether plausible, att.i.tude towards me. I was no longer a child; that was a self-evident fact: neither was I yet what society calls a "young lady," but now-a-days an interesting medium has been established and acknowledged; it is the first grade wherein the embryo society belles are initiated into all the intricacies of high life. It has its own peculiarities, its flutters of excitement, its rounds of pleasures, and distractions of every kind, aye--it has even its gossip, although the whisperers are but budding misses with golden or raven locks floating down their backs.

It is the adolescent stage: where the lisp or drawl, most popular in the advanced circles, is affected with unquestionable propriety: when growing girls of susceptible sixteen, or thereabout, are meekly subjected to a rigid training and instruction by their older and more sophisticated sisters, when they learn "dauncing" and "tennis" and "riding," and go to small-and-earlies where a few grown couples are also invited to amuse them, or rather I should say instruct them.