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Updated: September 28, 2025
She appeared so childlike and unaffected, and her joyous, rippling laughter proved so contagious, that unconsciously the extra years which a few moments before seemed to have been added to his life dropped away; the grave, tense lines of his face relaxed, and before he was aware he was laughing heartily at the account of some school-girl escapade or at some tricks performed by Duke for his especial entertainment.
She had always jealously guarded her rights to the solitude of her own room; and, even when she was a school-girl, it had been an understood household regulation that no one was to enter it without knocking. But now that she was mistress of all the rooms in Seat-Sandal, she ignored the simple courtesy towards others. Consequently, when she entered, she saw the tears in her mother's eyes.
But on the whole they were starved and rather unhappy years; through no one's fault. My parents were very poor and perpetually in movement. Everybody did the best he could. With Oxford, however, and my seventeenth year, came a radical change. It was in July, 1865, while I was still a school-girl, that in the very middle of the Long Vacation I first saw Oxford.
"I ought not to allow myself to argue with you," she exclaimed. "I demean myself by doing it. But I liked you once, and for the sake of that time I try to tell you how mistaken you are!" Much of her confusion resulted from her wonder and alarm at finding herself in a sense dominated mentally and emotionally by this simple school-girl. "I do not love him," she went on, with desperate untruth.
When he and Horace went to the Blakes' he amused himself idly enough with the school-girl, while his cousin flirted with Addie. He laughed one day when Mrs. Blake was unusually troubled about Lottie's apparel, and said something about "a sweet neglect." But the soul of Lottie's mamma was not to be comforted with scraps of poetry.
Riding with Texas Joe in a light buckboard drawn by a span of lively broncos with El Capitan leading behind, she was as merry as a school-girl out for a long-talked-of holiday.
She hesitated, and stammered, and flushed like a school-girl, as at last she faltered: "I I think I believe I am." "Then I trust you are wide-awake, and a faithful worker in the vineyard," he said, earnestly. "These are times when the Master needs true and faithful workmen."
He was in Europe when Napoleon was at the height of his power, when his armies swept from the Danube to the Guadalquivir; but that strange story, which the giddiest school-girl cannot read with divided attention, drew no remark from his lips. It is said that he was fond of his daughter; it was a fondness of the head, not of the heart.
"What Miss Grey bears, I suppose I can," thought she to herself when many times during the last two weeks she had been addressed in a manner which somewhat surprised her, as being a mode of speech more fitting from a school-mistress to a naughty school-girl than from a sister to a young wife, or, indeed, from any lady to any other lady at least, according to her code of manners.
I remember when I returned from abroad, a school-girl, I thought I had forgotten my mother's face. This copy of yours will save me from that nonsensical morbid feeling, and you will surely not forget mine.... You bid me, if anything should go ill with me, summon you across the Atlantic.
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