Bessie’s tears overflowed.  “I hate girls!” she said with an asperity that quite shamed her mother, “they are so silly.”  Mr. John Short with difficulty forbore a smile.  “And they don’t like me!” she added with gusty wrath.  “I never get on with girls, never!  I don’t know what to say to them.  And when they find out that I can’t speak French or play on the piano, they will laugh at me.”  Her own countenance broke into a laugh as she uttered the prediction, but she laughed with tears still in her eyes.

The lawyer nodded his head in a satisfied way.  “It will all come right in time,” said he.  “If you can make fun of the prospect of school, the reality will not be very terrible to a young lady of your courageous temper.”

Poor Bessie was grave again in an instant.  She felt that she had let her fate slip out of her hands.  She could not now declare her refusal to go to school at all; she could only choose what kind of school she would go to.  “If it must be one or another, let it be French,” she said, and rushed from the room in a tempestuous mood.

Mrs. Carnegie excused her as very affectionate, and as tired and overdone.  She looked tired and overdone herself, and out of spirits as well.  Mr. John Short said a few sympathetic words, and volunteered a few reasonable pledges for the future, and then took his leave—­the kindest thing he could do, since thus he set the mother at liberty to go and comfort her child.  Her idea of comforting and Bessie’s idea of being comforted consisted, for the nonce, in having a good cry together.

* * * * *

When his agent came to explain to Mr. Fairfax how far he had carried his negotiations for his granddaughter’s removal from Beechhurst, the squire demurred.  The thorn which Mr. Wiley had planted in his conscience was rankling sorely; his pride was wounded too—­perhaps that was more hurt even than his conscience—­but he felt that he had much to make up to the child, not for his long neglect only, but for the indignities that she had been threatened with.  She might have been apprenticed to a trade; he might have had to negotiate with some shopkeeper to cancel her indentures.  He did not open his mind to Mr. John Short on this matter; he kept it to himself, and made much more of it in his imagination than it deserved.  Bessie had already forgotten it, except as a part of the odd medley that her life seemed coming to, and in the recollection it never vexed her; but it was like a grain of sand in her grandfather’s eye whenever he reviewed the incidents of this time.  He gathered from the lawyer’s account of the interview how little acceptable to Bessie was the notion of being sent to school, and asked why she should not go to Abbotsmead at once?

“There is no reason why she should not go to Abbotsmead if you will have a lady in the house—­a governess,” said Mr. John Short.

“I will have no governess in the house; I suppose she is too young to be alone?”