enter into the expense and inconvenience
of a second. So run away like a sensible girl and stick to your books.
You had better leave these drawings with me and think no more about
them."

Saying this, Mr. Enderby opened a drawer and locked up Hetty's designs
within it; and, humbled and despairing, Hetty returned to the
school-room.

Her face of grief and her empty hands told sufficiently what the result
of her errand had been. No remark was made by Miss Davis or the girls,
though Nell, who thought the drawings wonderfully pretty, was impatient
to know what her papa had said of them. She was too much in awe of Miss
Davis to seek to have her curiosity gratified just then; and the evening
study went on as if nothing had happened.

CHAPTER XVII.

HETTY'S FUTURE IS PLANNED.

This was the severest trial Hetty had ever encountered. Longing for
special love, and delight in reproducing the beautiful, were part of one
and the same impulse in her nature, and, crushed in the one, all her
heart had gone forth in the other direction. Now both had been equally
condemned in her as faults, and she fell back, as before, on the mere
dull effort towards submission which had already carried her surely, if
joylessly, over so many difficult years of her young life. She worked
patiently at her books and fulfilled her duties; and she grew thinner
and paler, and the old sad look became habitual to her lips and eyes.
Another year passed, and as Phyllis and Nell approached nearer and
nearer to the period for "coming out" they were more frequently absent
from the school-room, and Hetty's days were more solitary than they used
to be.

All her mind was now fixed on the idea of fitting herself as soon as
possible for some sort of post as governess. She knew she never could
take such a position as that which Miss Davis filled, and had meekly
admitted to herself that a humble situation must content her.

She often wondered how it would be with her when the Enderby girls
should no longer need Miss Davis; and decided according to her own
judgment that she ought to be ready to seek a place for herself in the
world as soon as the elder girls should have completed their studies.

One evening she sat opposite to Miss Davis at the school-room fireside.
Phyllis and Nell were in the drawing-room with their mother. Miss Davis
was netting energetically, and Hetty, who had been studying busily,
dropped her book and was gazing absently into the fi