United States or Nepal ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A match was struck across the landing and voices sounded. Gertrude was in the room lighting the gas and Clara tugging down the blind. Emma was sitting with her hands pressed to her eyes, quickly gasping, "Ach Clara! Mein Gott! Ach Gott!" On Ulrica's bed nothing was visible but a mound of bedclothes. The whole landing was astir. Fraulein's voice called up urgently from below.
"We didn't mean to be cruel," she explained, earnestly, answering the one of Fraulein's charges which had most impressed her. "We love Ivan. We love him lots. We like to see him to be a sunbeam, an' we thought he liked to be one. He never said he didn't." The faces of his little companions were all around him. Ivan surveyed them in turn. They loved him lots. Had not Josephine just said so?
Then the rhythm took her again and with the second "sur l'eau, si beau," she saw a very blue lake and a little boat with lateen sails, and during the third verse began to forget the lifeless voice. As the murmured refrain came from the girls there was a slight movement in Fraulein's sofa-corner.
The rest of the girls were gathered in the large schoolroom under the care of Mademoiselle for Saturday's raccommodage. It was the last hour of the week's work. Presently there would be a great gonging, the pianos would cease, Fraulein's voice would sound up through the house "Anziehen zum Aus-geh-hen!"
Once or twice she felt Fraulein's look; she sustained it, and glowed happily under it without meeting it; she referred back contentedly to it after hearing herself laugh out once just as she would do at home; once or twice she forgot for a moment where she was.
Fraulein had disappeared. The train was high above the platform. Politely smiling Miriam scrambled to the window. The platform was moving, the large bright station moving away. Fraulein's wide smile was creasing and caverning under her hat from which the veil was thrown back. Standing at the window Miriam smiled sharply. Fraulein's form flowed slowly away with the platform.
Then, remembering the subservient humility of the Fraulein's mind, she wondered if it could have been possible that she had been too timid to do more than sit waiting in the hall, perhaps afraid to allow the footman to disturb Lady Etynge by asking her where her pupil was. The poor, meek, silly thing.
She once caught a glimpse of Gertrude flushed and downcast, confronting Fraulein's reproachful voice upon the stairs; and one day in the basement she heard Ulrica tearfully refuse to clean her own boots and saw Fraulein stand before her bowing and smiling, and with the girls gathered round, herself brush and polish the slender boots. She was glad to get away with Minna.
The English girls having sat out two meal-times with her, had ceased the hard-eyed observation which had made the long silence of the earlier repasts only less embarrassing than Fraulein's questions about England.
Fräulein's voice drowned the muffled rumbling of a carriage and a ring at the bell, the handle of which, uninjured amid the chaos, kept watch above the remains of the late porch. The Bishop stood a moment in the little hall, while the maid went into the dining-room to tell the Gresleys of his arrival. His eyes rested on the pile of letters on the table, on the dead flowers beside them.
Word Of The Day