matter. Isa sprang to me, declaring that it was all Charley's absurd suspicion and misconstruction. At last, amid hot words on both sides, I found that Charley had just found, shut into a small album which Metelill keeps upon the drawing-room table, a newly taken photograph of young Horne, one of the pupils, with a foolish devoted inscription upon the envelope, directed to Miss Fulford.
Isa protested that she had only popped it in to keep it safe until she could return it. Charley broke out. 'As if I did not know better than that! Didn't you make him give you that parasol and promise him your photo? Ay, and give it him in return? You thought he would keep your secret, I suppose, but he tells everything, like a donkey as he is, to Bertie Elwood, and Bertie and I have such fun over him. And now, because you are jealous of poor Metelill, and think Aunt Charlotte may take a fancy to you instead of her, you are sticking his photo into her book just to do her harm with the aunts. I'm not strait-laced. I wouldn't mind having the photos of a hundred and fifty young men, only they would be horrid guys and all just alike; but Aunt Charlotte is-is-well-a regular old maid about it, and you knew she would mind it, and so you did it on purpose to upset Metelill's chances.'
Isa clung to me in floods of tears, desiring me not to believe anything so cruel and false. Every one always was so hard upon her, she said, and she had only put the thing inadvertently there, to get it out of sight, into the first book she saw, but unfortunately she did not know I had heard her trying to pass it off to Charley as a jest. However, as there was no proof there, I asked about the parasol. While the shopping was going on, she and young Horne had been in another street, and this was the consequence! I was perfectly confounded. Receive presents from young men! It seemed to me quite impossible. 'Oh, Isa thinks nothing of that!' said Charley. 'Ask her where she got those bangles, and that bouquet which she told you was half Metelill's. You think me awful, I know, Aunt Charlotte, but I do draw a line, though I would never have said one word about it if she had not played this nasty trick on Metelill.' Isa would have begun some imploring excuse, but our two gentlemen were seen coming up towards the window, and she fled, gasping out an entreaty that I would not tell Uncle Martyn.
Nor did I then and there, for I needed to understand the matter and look into it, so I told Martyn and Horace not to wait for me, and heard Charley's story more coolly. I had thought that Mr. Horne was Metelill's friend. 'So he was at first,' Charley said, 'but he is an uncommon goose, and Isa is no end of a hand at doing the pathetic poverty-stricken orphan! That's the way she gets so many presents!' Then she explained, in her select slang, that young Horne's love affairs were the great amusement of his fellow-pupils, and that she, being sure that the parasol was no present from me, as Isa had given the cousins to understand, had set Bertie Elwood to extract the truth by teasing his friend. 'But I never meant to have told,' said Charley, 'if you had not come in upon us, when I was in the midst of such a wax that I did not know what I was saying'; and on my demanding what she meant by the elegant expression she had used about Isa and me, she explained that it was the schoolboy's word for currying favour. Every one but we stupid elders perceived the game, nay, even the Druces, living in full confidence with their children, knew what was going on. I have never spoken, but somehow people must read through one's brains, for there was a general conviction that I was going to choose a niece to accompany us. I wonder if you, my wise brother, let out anything to Edith. It is what men always do, they bind women to silence and then disclose the secret themselves, and say, 'Nothing is safe with these women.'
Any way, these girls have been generous, or else true to their
Poor girl, she must be very clever, for she kept up her constant wooing of me while she also coquetted with Mr. Horne, being really, as her contemporaries declare, a much worse flirt than Metelill, but the temptation of the parasol threw her off her guard, and she was very jealous of my taking out Metelill and Avice. I see now that it has been her effort to keep the others away from me. This spiteful trick, if it be true that she meant it, seems to have been done on Metelill, as being supposed to be her only real rival. Avice always yields to her, and besides, is too inoffensive to afford her any such opportunity.
When I talked to Mary, she said, 'Oh yes, I always knew she was a horrid little treacherous puss. Nature began it, and that governess worked on a ready soil. We sent her to school, and hoped she was cured, but I have long seen that it has only shown her how to be more plausible. But what can one do? One could not turn out an orphan, and I did not see that she was doing our own girls any harm. I'm sure I gave her every chance of marrying, for there was nothing I wished for so much, and I never told Martyn of her little manuvres, knowing he would not stand them; and now what he will do, I can't think, unless you and Edward will take her off our hands. I believe you might do her good. She is an unfathomable mixture of sham and earnest, and she really likes you, and thinks much of you, as having a certain prestige, and being a woman of the world' (fancy that). 'Besides, she is really religious in a sort of a way; much good you'll say it does her, but, as you know, there's a certain sort of devotion which makes no difference to people's conduct.'
It seems to be the general desire of the family that we should take this unfortunate Isabel off their hands. Shall we? Cruelly as I have been disappointed in the girl, I can't help liking her; she is obliging, pleasant, ladylike in manners, very affectionate, and I can't help thinking that with the respect and fear for you she would feel she might be restrained, and that we could be the saving of her, though at the same time I know that my having been so egregiously deceived may be a sign that I am not fit to deal with her. I leave it to your decision altogether, and will say no more till I hear. Metelill is a charming girl, and I fancy you prefer her, and that her mother knows it, and would send her for at least a winter; but she gets so entirely off her balance whenever a young man of any sort comes near, that I should not like to take charge of her. It might be good for the worthy Jane, but as she would take a great deal of toning down and licking into shape, and as she would despise it all, refer everything to the Bourne Parva standard, and pine for home and village school, I don't think she need be considered, especially as I am sure she would not go, and could not be spared. Pica would absorb herself in languages and antiquities, and maintain the rights of women by insisting on having full time to study her protoplasms, snubbing and deriding all the officers who did not talk like Oxford dons. Probably the E. E. would be the only people she would think fit to speak to. Avice is the one to whom I feel the most drawn. She is thoroughly thoughtful, and her religion is not of the uninfluential kind Mary describes. Those distresses and perplexities which poor Isa affected were chiefly borrowed from her genuine ones; but she has obtained the high cultivation and intelligence that her Oxford life can give in full measure, and without conceit or pretension, and it is her unselfish, yielding spirit that has prevented me from knowing her sooner, though when not suppressed she can be thoroughly agreeable, and take her part in society with something of her mother's brilliancy. I think, too, that she would be spared, as Oxford does not agree with her, and a southern winter or two would be very good for her. Besides, the others might come and see her in vacation time. Could we not take both her and Isabel at least for the first winter?
19.-A stormy wet day, the first we have had. Poor Isa has made an attempt at explanation and apology, but lost herself in a mist of words and tears. I suppose I was severe, for she shrinks from me, and clings to Avice, who has stood her friend in many a storm before, and, as Jane indignantly tells me, persists in believing that she is really sorry and wishes to be good. She is very attentive and obliging, and my dear mother, who is in happy ignorance of all this uproar, really likes her the best of all the girls.
21.-We have had a great alarm. Last evening we went to the parish church; Horace Druce had been asked to preach, and the rain, which had fallen all the morning, cleared off just in time for the walk. Emily, Margaret, two of her children, and I sat in the gallery, and Avice and Isa in the free seats below. Avice had been kept at home by the rain in the morning, but had begged leave to go later. Darkness came on just as the first hymn was given out, and the verger went round with his long wand lighting the gas. In the gallery we saw plainly how, at the east end, something went wrong with his match, one which he thought had failed, and threw aside. It fell on a strip of straw matting in the aisle, which, being very dry, caught fire and blazed up for a few seconds before it was trampled out. Some foolish person, however, set the cry of 'Fire!' going, and you know what that is in a crowded church. The vicar, in his high old-fashioned desk with a back to it, could not see. Horace in a chair, in the narrow, shallow sanctuary, did see that it was nothing, but between the cries of 'Fire!' and the dying peal of the organ, could not make his voice heard. All he could do was to get to the rear of the crowd, together with the other few who had seen the real state of things, and turn back all those whom they could, getting them out through the vestry. But the main body were quite out of their reach, and everybody tried to rush scrambling into the narrow centre aisle, choking up the door, which was a complicated trap meant to keep out draughts. We in the gallery tried vainly to assure them that the only danger was in the crowd, and the clergyman in his desk, sure that was the chief peril, at any rate, went on waving and calling to them to wait; but the cries and shrieks drowned everything, and there was
