'Yes; very well.'

'Papa you really are very cruel to that poor girl,' were Ethel's
first words outside.

'Am I? I wouldn't be for worlds, Ethel. But somehow she always puts
me in a rage. I wish I knew she was not worrying her brother at this
moment!'

No, Averil was on the staircase, struggling, choking with the first
tears she had shed. All this fortnight of unceasing vigilance and
exertion, her eyes had been dry, for want of time to realize, for
want of time to weep, and now she was ashamed that hurt feeling
rather than grief had opened the fountain. She could not believe
that it was not a cruel act of kindness, to carry one so weak as
Leonard away from home to the care of a stranger. She apprehended
all manner of ill consequences; and then nursing him, and regarding
his progress as her own work, had been the sedative to her grief,
which would come on her 'like an armed man,' in the dreariness of his
absence. Above all, she felt herself ill requited by his manifest
eagerness to leave her who had nursed him so devotedly--her, his own
sister--for the stiff, plain Miss May whom he hardly knew. The blow
from the favourite companion brother, so passionately watched and
tended, seemed to knock her down; and Dr. May, with medical
harshness, forbidding her the one last hope of persuading him out of
the wild fancy, filled up the measure.

Oh, those tears! How they would swell up at each throb of the
wounded heart, at each dismal foreboding of the desponding spirit.