upon the sofa, and there Esther was rather
more alone than anywhere else. The colonel was reading; reverence
obliged her to keep quiet; he drew long breaths of weariness or sadness
every now and then, which every time came like a cloud over such
sunshine as she had been able to conjure up; and besides all that,
notwithstanding the sighs and the reading, her father always noticed
and knew what she was doing. Now it is needless to say that Colonel
Gainsborough had forgotten what it was to be a child; he was therefore
an incompetent critic of a child's doings or judge of a child's wants.
He had an impatience for what he called a 'waste of time;' but Esther
was hardly old enough to busy herself exclusively with history and
geography; and the little innocent amusements to which she had recourse
stood but a poor chance under his censorship. 'A waste of time, my
daughter,' he would say, when he saw Esther busy perhaps with some
childish fancy work, or reading something from which she promised
herself entertainment, but which the colonel knew promised nothing
more. A word from him was enough. Esther would lay down her work or put
away the book, and then sit in forlorn uncertainty what she should do
to make the long hours drag less heavily. History and geography and
arithmetic she studied, in a sort, with her father; and Colonel
Gainsborough was not a bad teacher, so far as the progress of his
scholar was concerned. So far as her pleasure went, the lessons were
very far behind those she used to have with Pitt. And the recitations
were short. Colonel Gainsborough gave his orders, as if he were on a
campaign, and expected to see them fulfilled. Seeing them fulfilled, he
turned his attention at once to something else.

Esther longed for her former friend and instructor with a longing which
cannot be put into words. Yet longing is hardly the expression for it;
she was not a child to sit and wish for the unattainable; it was rather
a deep and aching sense of want. She never forgot him. If Pitt's own
mother thought of him more constantly, she was the only person in the
world of whom that was true. Pitt sometimes wrote to Colonel
Gainsborough, and then Esther treasured up every revelation and detail
of the letter and added them to what she knew already, so as to piece
out as full an image as possible of Pitt's life and doings. But how the
child wanted him, missed him, and wept for him! Though of the latter
not much; she was not a chil