"
She felt this the more when Babie, who had coaxed the housekeeper
into letting her begin a private school of cookery, started up,
crying—-
"I must go and see my orange biscuits taken out of the oven! I
should like to send a taste to Sydney!"
Yes, Barbara was childish for nearly sixteen, and, as it struck her
mother at the moment, rather wonderfully so considering her
cleverness and romance. It was better for her that the softening
should not come yet, but, mother as she was, Caroline's sympathies
could not but be at the moment with the warm-hearted, impulsive,
generous young man, moved out of all his habitual valetudinarian
habits by his affection, rather than with the light-hearted child,
who spurned the love she did not comprehend, and despised his ill-
health. Had the young generation no hearts? Oh no-—no-—it could not
be so with her loving Barbara, and she ought to be thankful for the
saving of pain and perplexity.
Poor Armine was not getting much comfort out of his friend, who was
too much preoccupied to attend to what he was saying, and only
mechanically assented at intervals to the proposition that it was an
inscrutable dispensation that the will and the power should so seldom
go together. He heard all Armine's fallen castles about chapels,
schools, curates, and sisters, as in a dream, really not knowing
whether they were or were not to be.
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