CHAPTER IV.

SCARSDALE WEIR.

I was up betimes next morning, long before Sister Agnes could possibly be ready to take me to the forest.  So I took my sewing into the garden, and found a pleasant sunny nook, where I sat and worked till breakfast time.  The meal was scarcely over when Sister Agnes sent for me.  It made my heart leap with pleasure to see how her beautiful, melancholy face lighted up at my approach.  Why should she feel such an interest in one whom she had never seen till a few hours ago?  The question was one I could not answer; I could only recognise the fact and be thankful.

The morning was delicious:  sunny, without being oppressive; while in the shade there was a faint touch of austerity like the first breath of coming winter.  A walk of two miles brought us to the skirts of the forest, and in five minutes after quitting the high road we might have been a hundred miles away from any habitation, so utterly lost and buried from the outer world did we seem to be.  Already the forest paths were half hidden by fallen leaves, which rustled pleasantly under our feet.  By-and-by we came to a pretty opening in the wood, where some charitable soul had erected a rude rustic seat that was more than half covered with the initials of idle wayfarers.  Here Sister Agnes sat down to rest.  She had brought a volume of poems with her, and while she read I wandered about, never going very far away, feasting on the purple blackberries, finding here and there a late-ripened cluster of nuts, trying to find out a nest or two among the thinned foliage, and enjoying myself in a quiet way much to my heart’s content.

I don’t think Sister Agnes read much that morning.  Her gaze was oftener away from her book than on it.  After a time she came and joined me in gathering nuts and blackberries.  She seemed brighter and happier than I had hitherto seen her, entering into all my little projects with as much eagerness as though she were herself a child.  How soon I had learned to love her!  Why had I lived all those dreary years at Park Hill without knowing her?  But I could never again feel quite so lonely—­never quite such an outcast from that common household love which all the girls I had known seemed to accept as a matter of course.  Even if I should unhappily be separated from Sister Agnes, I could not cease to love her; and although I had seen her for the first time barely forty-eight hours ago, my child’s instinct told me that she possessed that steadfastness, sweet and strong, which allows no name that has once been written on its heart to be erased therefrom for ever.

My thoughts were running in some such groove, but they were all as tangled and confused as the luxuriant undergrowth around me.  It must have been out of this confusion that the impulse arose which caused me to address a question to Sister Agnes that startled her as much as if a shell had exploded at her feet.