“There! there!” I said, “don’t lose your head.  I can’t call to mind that anything happened to alarm Rosanna.”

“Nothing to alarm her, father.  But Mr. Franklin said he took no interest whatever in her—­and, oh, he said it in such a cruel voice!”

“He said it to stop the Sergeant’s mouth,” I answered.

“I told her that,” says Penelope.  “But you see, father (though Mr. Franklin isn’t to blame), he’s been mortifying and disappointing her for weeks and weeks past; and now this comes on the top of it all!  She has no right, of course, to expect him to take any interest in her.  It’s quite monstrous that she should forget herself and her station in that way.  But she seems to have lost pride, and proper feeling, and everything.  She frightened me, father, when Mr. Franklin said those words.  They seemed to turn her into stone.  A sudden quiet came over her, and she has gone about her work, ever since, like a woman in a dream.”

I began to feel a little uneasy.  There was something in the way Penelope put it which silenced my superior sense.  I called to mind, now my thoughts were directed that way, what had passed between Mr. Franklin and Rosanna overnight.  She looked cut to the heart on that occasion; and now, as ill-luck would have it, she had been unavoidably stung again, poor soul, on the tender place.  Sad! sad!—­all the more sad because the girl had no reason to justify her, and no right to feel it.

I had promised Mr. Franklin to speak to Rosanna, and this seemed the fittest time for keeping my word.

We found the girl sweeping the corridor outside the bedrooms, pale and composed, and neat as ever in her modest print dress.  I noticed a curious dimness and dullness in her eyes—­not as if she had been crying but as if she had been looking at something too long.  Possibly, it was a misty something raised by her own thoughts.  There was certainly no object about her to look at which she had not seen already hundreds on hundreds of times.

“Cheer up, Rosanna!” I said.  “You mustn’t fret over your own fancies.  I have got something to say to you from Mr. Franklin.”

I thereupon put the matter in the right view before her, in the friendliest and most comforting words I could find.  My principles, in regard to the other sex, are, as you may have noticed, very severe.  But somehow or other, when I come face to face with the women, my practice (I own) is not conformable.

“Mr. Franklin is very kind and considerate.  Please to thank him.”  That was all the answer she made me.

My daughter had already noticed that Rosanna went about her work like a woman in a dream.  I now added to this observation, that she also listened and spoke like a woman in a dream.  I doubted if her mind was in a fit condition to take in what I had said to her.

“Are you quite sure, Rosanna, that you understand me?” I asked.

“Quite sure.”