“Naturally, Evelyn, you do not like to part with her.  None of us do.  But go to your room and think it over reasonably.  The relations of childhood cannot last forever.”

Evelyn stood for a moment undecided.  Her mother’s calm self-control had not deceived her.  She was no longer a child.  It was a woman reading a woman.  All her lifetime came back to her to interpret this moment.  In the reaction of the second, the deepest pain was no longer for herself, nor even for Miss McDonald, but for a woman who showed herself so insensible to noble feeling.  Protest was useless.  But why was the separation desired?  She did not fully see, but her instinct told her that it had a relation to her mother’s plans for her; and as life rose before her in the society, in the world, into which she was newly launched, she felt that she was alone, absolutely alone.  She tried to speak, but before she could collect her thoughts her mother said: 

“There, go now.  It is useless to discuss the matter.  We all have to learn to bear things.”

Evelyn went away, in a tumult of passion and of shame, and obeyed her impulse to go where she had always found comfort.

Miss McDonald was in her own room.  Her trunk was opened.  She had taken her clothes from the closet.  She was opening the drawers and laying one article here and another there.  She was going from closet to bureau, opening this door and shutting that in her sitting-room and bedroom, in an aimless, distracted way.  Out of her efforts nothing had so far come but confusion.  It seemed an impossible dream that she was actually packing up to go away forever.

Evelyn entered in a haste that could not wait for permission.

“Is it true?” she cried.

McDonald turned.  She could not speak.  Her faithful face was gray with suffering.  Her eyes were swollen with weeping.  For an instant she seemed not to comprehend, and then a flood of motherly feeling overcame her.  She stretched out her arms and caught the girl to her breast in a passionate embrace, burying her face in her neck in a vain effort to subdue her sobbing.

What was there to say?  Evelyn had come to her refuge for comfort, and to Evelyn the comforter it was she herself who must be the comforter.  Presently she disengaged herself and forced the governess into an easy chair.  She sat down on the arm of the chair and smoothed her hair and kissed her again and again.

“There.  I’m going to help you.  You’ll see you have not taught me for nothing.”  She jumped up and began to bustle about.  “You don’t know what a packer I am.”

“I knew it must come some time,” she was saying, with a weary air, as she followed with her eyes the light step of the graceful girl, who was beginning to sort things and to bring order out of the confusion, holding up one article after another and asking questions with an enforced cheerfulness that was more pathetic than any burst of grief.