those white
walls. Once in there, I quite forgot that mamma and papa could see
them; I was so busy seeing them myself.
This amusement of mine was one which nobody interfered with, and it
lasted, as I said, all winter. All the winter my father and mother
were in Egypt. When spring came, I began to look with trembling
eagerness for a letter that should say they would turn now homewards.
I was disappointed. My father was so much better that his physicians
were encouraged to continuing their travelling regimen; and the word
came that it was thought best he should try a long sea voyage--he was
going to China, my mother would go with him.
I think never in my life my spirits sank lower than they did when I
heard this news. I was not strong nor very well, which might have been
in part the reason. And I was dull-hearted to the last degree under
the influence of Miss Pinshon's system of management. There was no
power of reaction in me. It was plain that I was failing; and my aunt
interrupted the lessons, and took me again to watering-places at the
North, from one to another, giving me as much change as possible. It
was good for me to be taken off study, which Miss Pinshon had pressed
and crowded during the winter. Sea bathing did me good, too; and the
change of scene and habits was useful. I did not rise to the level of
enjoying anything much; only the sea waves when I was in them; at
other times I sat on the bank and watched the distant smokestack of a
steamer going out, with an inexpressible longing and soreness of
heart. Going where I would so like to go! But there was no word of
that. And indeed it would not have been advisable to take me to China.
I did think Egypt would not have been bad for me; but it was a thought
which I kept shut up in the farthest stores of my heart.
The sea voyage however was delayed. My mother took sick, was very ill,
and then unable to undertake the going to China. My father chose to
wait for her; so the summer was spent by them in Switzerland and the
autumn in Paris. With the first of the New Year they expected now to
sail. It suddenly entered my Aunt Gary's head that it was a good time
for _her_ to see Paris; and she departed, taking Ransom with her, whom
my father wished to place in a German university, and meantime in a
French school. Preston had been placed at the Military Academy at West
Point, my aunt thinking that it made a nice finishing of a gentleman's
education, and would keep him
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