"It's all a mere mistake and a worry and a joke--and we'll go home as fast
as we can!"
Our companion, on this, had responded with a strange,
quick primness of propriety, and they were again, with Mrs. Grose
on her feet, united, as it were, in pained opposition to me.
Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of reprobation,
and even at that minute I prayed God to forgive me for seeming
to see that, as she stood there holding tight to our friend's dress,
her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed,
had quite vanished. I've said it already--she was literally,
she was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly.
"I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing.
I never HAVE. I think you're cruel. I don't like you!"
Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a
vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose
more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little face.
In this position she produced an almost furious wail.
"Take me away, take me away--oh, take me away from HER!"
"From ME?" I panted.
"From you--from you!" she cried.
Even Mrs. Grose looked across at me dismayed, while I had
nothing to do but communicate again with the figure that,
on the opposite bank, without a movement, as rigidly still
as if catching, beyond the interval, our voices, was as vividly
there for my disaster as it was not there for my service.
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