'Ask yourself, Bell, how it would be with you. But I sometimes fancy that you measure me differently from yourself.'
'Indeed I do, for I know how much better you are.'
'I am not so much better as to be ever able to forget all that. I know I never shall do so. I have made up my mind about it clearly and with an absolute certainty.'
'Lily, Lily, Lily! pray do not say so.'
'But I do say it. And yet I have not been very mopish and melancholy; have I, Bell? I do think I deserve some little credit, and yet, I declare, you won't allow me the least privilege in the world.'
'What privilege would you wish me to give you?'
'To talk about Dr Crofts.'
'Lily, you are a wicked, wicked tyrant.' And Bell leaned over her, and fell upon her, and kissed her, hiding her own face in the gloom of the evening. After that it came to be an accepted understanding between them that Bell was not altogether indifferent to Dr Crofts.
'You heard what he said, my darling,' Mrs Dale said the next day, as the three were in the room together after Dr Crofts was gone. Mrs Dale was standing on one side of the bed, and Bell on the other, while Lily was scolding them both. 'You can get up for an hour or two to-morrow, but he thinks you had better not go out of the room.'
'What would be the good of that, mamma? I am so tired of looking always at the same paper. It is such a tiresome paper. It makes one count the pattern over and over again. I wonder how you ever can live here.'
'I've got used to it, you see.'
'I never can get used to that sort of thing; but go on counting, and counting, and counting. I'll tell you what I should like; and I'm sure it would be the best thing, too.'
'And what would you like?' said Bell.
'Just to get up at nine o'clock to-morrow, and go to church as though nothing had happened. Then, when Dr Crofts came in the evening, you would tell him I was down at the school.'
'I wouldn't quite advise that,' said Mrs Dale.
'It would give him such a delightful start. And when he found I didn't die immediately, as of course I ought to do according to rule, he would be so disgusted.'
'It would be very ungrateful, to say the least of it,' said Bell.
'No, it wouldn't, a bit. He needn't come, unless he likes it. And I don't believe he comes to see me at all. It's all very well, mamma, your looking in that way; but I'm sure it's true. And I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll pretend to be bad again, otherwise the poor man will be robbed of his only happiness.'
'I suppose we must allow her to say what she likes till she gets well,' said Mrs Dale, laughing. It was now nearly dark, and Mrs Dale did not see that Bell's hand had crept under the bed-clothes, and taken hold of that of her sister. 'It's true, mamma,' continued Lily, 'and I defy her to deny it. I would forgive him for keeping me in bed if he would only make her fall in love with him.'
'She has made a bargain, mamma,' said Bell, 'that she is to say whatever she likes till she gets well.'
'I am to say whatever I like always; that was the bargain, and I mean to stand to it.'
On the following Sunday Lily did get up, but did not leave her mother's bedroom. There she was, seated in that half-dignified and half-luxurious state which belongs to the first getting up of an invalid, when Dr Crofts called. There she had eaten her tiny bit of roast mutton, and had called her mother a stingy old creature, because she would not permit another morsel; and there she had drunk her half glass of port wine, pretending that it was very bad, and twice worse than the doctor's physic; and there, Sunday though it was, she had fully enjoyed the last hour of daylight, reading that exquisite new novel which had just completed itself, amidst the jarring criticisms of the youth and age of the reading public.
'I am quite sure she was right in accepting him, Bell,' she said, putting down the book as the light was fading, and beginning to praise the story.
'It was a matter of course,' said Bell. 'It always is right in the novels. That's why I don't like them. They are too sweet.'
'That's why I do like them, because they are so sweet. A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you'd like to get.'
'If so, then, I'd go back to the old school, and have the heroine
