mustn't sing, nor dance, nor do anything
on Sunday."

And in this naughty way the young woman went on for the rest of the
evening, and was complimented by her mother and sister when poor Harry
took his leave. He was not ready of wit, and could not fling back the
taunts which Hetty cast against him. Nay, had he been able to retort, he
would have been silent. He was too generous to engage in that small war,
and chose to take all Hester's sarcasms without an attempt to parry
or evade them. Very likely the young lady watched and admired that
magnanimity, while she tried it so cruelly. And after one of her fits of
ill-behaviour, her parents and friends had not the least need to scold
her, as she candidly told them, because she suffered a great deal more
than they would ever have had her, and her conscience punished her a
great deal more severely than her kind elders would have thought of
doing. I suppose she lies awake all that night, and tosses and tumbles
in her bed. I suppose she wets her pillow with tears, and should not
mind about her sobbing: unless it kept her sister awake; unless she was
unwell the next day, and the doctor had to be fetched; unless the whole
family is to be put to discomfort; mother to choke over her dinner in
flurry and indignation; father to eat his roast-beef in silence and with
bitter sauce; everybody to look at the door each time it opens, with a
vague hope that Harry is coming in. If Harry does not come, why at least
does not George come? thinks Miss Theo.

Some time in the course of the evening comes a billet from George
Warrington, with a large nosegay of lilacs, per Mr. Gumbo. "'I send my
best duty and regards to Mrs. Lambert and the ladies,'" George says,
"'and humbly beg to present to Miss Theo this nosegay of lilacs, which
she says she loves in the early spring. You must not thank me for them,
please, but the gardener of Bedford House, with whom I have made great
friends by presenting him with some dried specimens of a Virginian plant
which some ladies don't think as fragrant as lilacs.

"'I have been in the garden almost all the day. It is alive with
sunshine and spring; and I have been composing two scenes of you know
what, and polishing the verses which the Page sings in the fourth act,
under Sybilla's window, which she cannot hear, poor thing, because she
has just had her head off.'"

"Provoking! I wish he would not always sneer and laugh! The verses are
beautiful," says Theo.