Cousin Cosmo sometimes at
breakfast but never at any other hour of the day, unless I happened to
pass him on the staircase, which I avoided as much as possible, you may
be sure, for if he did speak to me it was as if I were about three years
old, and he was sure to say something about being very quiet. I don't
think I could have been expected to like him, but I'm afraid I almost
hated him then. It would have been better--that is one of the things
grandmamma now says--to have told me more of their great anxiety, and it
certainly would have been better to send me to school, to some
day-school even, for the time.

As it was, day by day I grew more miserable, for you see I had nothing
to look forward to, no actual reason for hoping that my life would ever
be happier again, for, not knowing but that poor Cousin Agnes might die
any day, grandmamma did not like to speak of the future at all.

I never saw her--Cousin Agnes I mean--never except once, but I have not
come to that yet. At last, things came to a crisis with me. One day, one
morning, Belinda told me that I must not stay in my room as it was to be
what she called 'turned out,' by which she meant that it was to undergo
an extra thorough cleaning. She had forgotten to tell me this the night
before, so that when I came up from breakfast, which I had had alone,
intending to settle down comfortably with my books before the fire, I
found there was no fire and everything in confusion.

'What am I to do?' I said.

'You must go down to the dining-room and do your lessons there,' said
Belinda. 'There will be no one to disturb you, once the breakfast things
are taken away.'

'Has Mr. Vandeleur had his breakfast?' I asked.

'I don't know,' said Belinda, shortly, for she had been told not to tell
me that Cousin Agnes had been so ill in the night that the great doctor
had been sent for, and they were now having a consultation about her in
the library.

'I'll help you to get your things together,' she went on, 'and you must
go downstairs as quietly as possible.'

We collected my books. It made me melancholy to see them, there were
such piles of exercises grandmamma had never had time to look over!
Belinda heaped them all on to the top of my atlas, the glass ink-bottle
among them.

'Are they quite steady?' I said. 'Hadn't I better come up again and only
take half now?'

'Oh, dear, no,' said Belinda,'they are right enough if you walk
carefully,' for in her heart she knew