you shall join
them again at tea."

He led the way, and she followed very willingly. Placing her in a chair
before the fire, he drew another to the rug; and seating himself, said just
as if speaking to Louisa--

"What have you been doing these two months? What is it that clouds your
face, my little sister?"

"Ah, sir! I am so weary of that school. You don't know what a relief it is
to come here."

"It is rather natural that you should feel home-sick. It is a fierce ordeal
for a child like you to be thrust so far from home."

"I am not home-sick now, I believe. I have in some degree become accustomed
to the separation from my father; but I am growing so different from what I
used to be; so different from what I expected. It grieves me to know that I
am changing for the worse; but, somehow, I can't help it. I make good
resolutions in the morning before I leave my room, and by noon I manage to
break all of them. The girls try me and I lose my patience. When I am at
home nothing of this kind ever troubles me."

"Miss Irene, yours is not a clinging, dependent disposition; if I have
rightly understood your character, you have never been accustomed to lean
upon others. After relying on yourself so long, why yield to mistrust now?
With years should grow the power, the determination, to do the work you
find laid out for you."

"It is precisely because I know how very poorly I have managed myself thus
far that I have no confidence in my own powers for future emergencies.
Either I have lived alone too long, or else not long enough; I rather think
the last. If they had only suffered me to act as I wished, I should have
been so much better at home. Oh, sir, I am not the girl I was eight months
ago. I knew how it would be when they sent me here."

"Some portentous cloud seems lowering over your future. What is it? You
ought to be a gleeful girl, full of happy hopes."

She sank farther back in her chair to escape his searching gaze and drooped
her face lower.

"Yes, yes; I know I ought, but people can't always shut their eyes."

"Shut their eyes to what?"

"Various coming troubles, Mr. Young."

His lip curled slightly, and, replacing the book on the table, he said, as
if speaking rather to himself than to her--

"The heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle
with his joy."

"You are not a stranger, sir."

"I see you are disposed to consider me such. I thought I was your brother.
But no