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Updated: May 13, 2025
I have a perfect right to know why anyone in my service is unhappy. Your fencing tells me that it is something which I have done which has hurt you, and I insist upon knowing what it is." "I shall not tell you," defiantly. "I am very angry with you, Alathea," my voice was stern. "I don't care!" hers was passionate. "I think you are very rude." "You have told me that before well I am rude then!
Alathea had gone into the little salon, I suppose, because for the same reason, she could not have returned to her room. I sat down in my chair quite exhausted. I did not feel like reading or doing anything. It was to-day that we were to go to the Duchesse's in the afternoon for Alathea to be presented to our friends as my wife! I wondered if she had forgotten this!
He ran his eye with satisfaction over her costume, from head to foot, and nodded. "You ain't never seen much of rough life, now have you, Barbara?" He turned, then, to Miss Alathea. "These young folks, raised the way we raise 'em, nowadays, get thinkin' that the whole world has been smoothed out for their treadin' an' they ain't far wrong. We do smooth out the world for 'em.
No one in the world will see me.... But where is that blessed knot-hole?" Suddenly her eye chanced on it, and, an instant later, was applied to it, the while the Colonel paused, with his back to her, still anxiously inspecting the tree. "Ah!" said Miss Alathea, aloud, as she caught a glimpse of something interesting inside the fence. Instantly the Colonel turned and looked down at her, startled.
"Alathea, again I ask you please to remove your glasses, as I told you before, I know that you wear them only so that I may not see your eyes, not for sight or light or anything. To keep them on is a little undignified and ridiculous now, and irritates me very much." She colored and straightened herself. "To remove my glasses was not part of the bargain.
"You bet dar is," said he, "a knot-hole not fur f'm de gran'-stan', an' a tree what you could climb, right handy." Miss Alathea was not favorable to the thought of climbing trees, and said so. "No, no; the knot-hole will be far better for me." "But, Miss 'Lethe, why, de Cunnel " She did not let him make his explanation. "Sh! Sh!" she hissed. "Not a word of this to him, or anyone!
Without a second's hesitation, with no thought for her own safety, she drew her skirts about her tightly, wrapped her shawl around her head to save her hair and dashed through the growing flames about the stable-door, into the inferno which now raged within the structure, just as Neb, running with a lurching step, but with a speed remarkable in one so old and stiffened by rheumatic pains, dashed back to the scene of the disaster, in advance of Frank, the Colonel, Holton, Miss Alathea and the other inmates of the house, guests, servants, all.
"I want you to understand something quite clearly, Alathea." She started when I said her name, "and that is that I expect you to treat me with confidence, and tell me anything which you think that I ought to know, so that we neither of us can be put in a false position, beyond that, believe me, I have no curiosity.
I remembered hearing that on the old Lord Braxted's death years ago, Braxted was sold to the Merrion-Walters, Ironfounders from Leeds. No doubt the old man had cut his daughter off without the traditional shilling, but even so, some hundreds a year must have been theirs. What then did the poverty of Alathea suggest? That some constant drain must be going on all the time.
So here was a fresh barrier arisen between Alathea and myself! a fresh barrier which I cannot explain away. The only comfort I get out of the whole thing is that imperative necessity must have been driving my little darling or she would not put up with any of these things for a moment, and would have given her demission at the same time as she wrote.
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