r-excited; more often they fell into a dreary state of drilled
diligence; but she was too much absorbed in the studies to look close
into the human beings, and marvelled when the fathers and mothers were
blind enough to part with her on the plea of health and need of change.

On the whole she had never liked any of her charges since the renowned
Anna Webster so well as Phoebe Fulmort; although her abilities did not
rise above the 'very fair,' and she was apt to be bewildered in
metaphysics and political economy; but then she had none of the
eccentricities of will and temper of Miss Fennimore's clever girls, nor
was she like most good-humoured ones, recklessly _insouciante_. Her only
drawback, in the governess's eyes, was that she never seemed desirous of
going beyond what was daily required of her--each study was a duty, and
not a subject of zeal.

Presently Miss Fennimore came back, followed by the two sisters, neither
of them in the best of tempers. Maria, a stout, clumsily-made girl of
fifteen, had the same complexion and open eyes as Phoebe, but her
colouring was muddled, the gaze full-orbed and vacant, and the lips,
always pouting, were just now swelled with the vexation that filled her
prominent eyelids with tears. Bertha, two years younger, looked as if
nature had designed her for a boy, and the change into a girl was not yet
decided. She, too, was very like Maria; but Maria's open nostrils were
in her a droll _retrousse_, puggish little nose; her chin had a boyish
squareness and decision, her round cheeks had two comical dimples, her
eyes were either stretched in defiance or narrowed up with fun, and a
slight cast in one gave a peculiar archness and character to her face;
her skin, face, hands, and all, were uniformly pinky; her hair in such
obstinate yellow curls, that it was to be hoped, for her sake, that the
fashion of being _crepe_ might continue. The brow lowered in petulance;
and as she kissed Phoebe, she muttered in her ear a vituperation of the
governess in schoolroom _patois_; then began tossing the lesson-books in
the air and catching them again, as a preliminary to finding the places,
thus drawing on herself a reproof in German. French and German were
alternately spoken in lesson hours by Phoebe and Bertha, who had lived
with foreign servants from infancy; but poor Maria had not the faculty of
keeping the tongues distinct, and corrections only terrified her into
confusion worse confounded, unti