as becoming rusty, and by her father's
advice she and Mollie were taking lessons together of Herr Freiligrath.
The master she had selected was a very strict one, and his lessons
entailed a great deal of preparation. No discipline could have been more
wholesome. Audrey forgot her perplexities while she translated
Wallenstein and followed the unhappy fortunes of Max and Theckla.

But she did not at once regain her cheerfulness, and the daily round of
duty was not performed without a great deal of effort and inward
prompting; if no task were left unfulfilled, if she were always ready to
give her mother or Geraldine the companionship they needed, and if her
father never missed one of her usual ministrations, it was because she
would listen to no plea of self-indulgence.

'You are unhappy, and I fear you must be unhappy and not at ease for a
long time,' she would say to herself in the intervals of her work; 'but
idleness will not help you.' And to give her her due, she was never
busier than during the summer that followed Michael's leave-taking. She
had no idea that Michael knew all she was doing, and that her father
often wrote to him. Michael had kept his word, and his letters to Audrey
were very few and far between, and there was not a word in them that her
mother or Geraldine could not have read if she had chosen to show them;
but Michael's letters had always been sacred to her. Still it was
impossible to answer them with her old freedom. The happy, sisterly
intercourse was now a thing of the past. She could no longer pour out to
her friend all her innocent girlish thoughts; a barrier--a strange,
unnatural barrier--had been built up between them, and Audrey's letters,
with all her painstaking effort, gave very little pleasure to Michael.

'Poor child! she is still afraid of me,' he thought, as he folded up the
thin paper. And he could not always suppress a sigh as he missed the old
playfulness and open-hearted affection that used to breathe in every
carelessly-worded sentence. But he knew that she could not help
herself; that it was impossible for her now to tell him how she missed
him and how heavily the days passed without him; and how could he know
it, if she thought less of Cyril and more of him every day?

Michael could not guess at all that inward self-questioning that seemed
for ever making dumb utterance in her breast. Now and then, when no one
needed her, she would wander down to 'Michael's bench' in the dusk