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While Bernardine was ruminating over this, she saw the short, thick-set figure of a man approaching. Should she advance or retreat? She felt sure he had seen her. He stopped quite short and looked at her. "Surely you can't be Miss Moore?" he inquired, incredulously. "Yes," replied Bernardine in a voice in which he detected tears.
THE crisp mountain air and the warm sunshine began slowly to have their effect on Bernardine, in spite of the Disagreeable Man's verdict. She still looked singularly lifeless, and appeared to drag herself about with painful effort; but the place suited her, and she enjoyed sitting in the sun listening to the music which was played by a scratchy string band.
It did look like an inexpressibly dreary place when Bernardine looked about at the great arched hall. Grand old paintings, a century old, judging by their antiquated look, hung upon the walls. A huge clock stood in one corner, and on either side of it there were huge elk heads, with spreading antlers tipped with solid gold.
Left to herself, Bernardine turned to the column indicated, and slowly perused the advertisement. It read as follows: "WANTED A quiet, modest young lady as companion to an elderly woman living in a grand, gloomy old house in the suburbs of a New England village. Must come well recommended. Address MRS. GARDINER, Lee, Mass." "Gardiner!"
And the school-girls would begin to laugh, not in their sleeves, but under their veils; charming little stifled laughs which made the vocal mothers frown. On another occasion, the centenarian was telling stories. She said that in her youth the Bernardine monks were every whit as good as the mousquetaires. It was a century which spoke through her, but it was the eighteenth century.
Pretty Fraulein Muller was leaning over her balcony carrying on a conversation with a picturesque Spanish youth below. Most of the English party had gone sledging and tobogganing. Mrs. Reffold had asked Bernardine to join them, but she had refused. Mrs. Reffold's friends were anything but attractive to Bernardine, although she liked Mrs. Reffold herself immensely.
Her face was so lovely, that, as Bernardine gazed, her heart grew so heavy and strained with pain, that she thought it must surely break. She was the same girl who had visited her at her humble home. The grand old lady took the haughty young beauty in her arms, calling her "daughter," and bidding her welcome to Gardiner Castle, her future home.
Then suddenly, she could not tell how or when the feeling entered her heart, the longing came to her to look upon the face of the young girl who had gained the love she would have given her very life ay, her hope of heaven to have retained. To sit quietly by and hear mother and daughter discuss the man she loved, was as hard for Bernardine to endure as the pangs of death.
"Yes, my dear; I knew her years ago, when we were both young girls. She looked then as you do now. I was distantly related to her, in fact. I I was wealthy in those days, but I have since lost all my money, and am now reduced to penury ay, to want," murmured the shabbily dressed woman. Bernardine sprung forward excitedly.
This trifle amused us the whole evening; the next day the story spread abroad that the Master of the Hunt had taken up the case of my little dog, and I even know for a fact that the Emperor himself laughed over it.” Laughter arose in both rooms. The Judge and the Bernardine were playing at marriage; spades were trumps, and the Judge was just about to make an important play.
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