A Colonial Wooing
was chilly, she sat by her window and listened to the harp that all winter had been silent, and turned over and over the blank pages of the little book Robert Pearson had given her. "If I had had such books as these some years ago, how full they would have been now!" she said to herself; "and I do wonder if one leaf now cannot be spared;" for she longed to write a real letter to John, something she had never done in all her life. "But why is there no music to-day?" she asked aloud, and then, looking more closely at the window, found the cord had been removed, and remembered she had taken it to the almost unused sitting-room downstairs, and there it had been all winter. She laughed at her discovery, and then took up the blank-book again. Why, indeed, she thought, should she have been taught to more than write her name, there was so little opportunity to make use of the knowledge. It had been a source of drudgery at times, for it had fallen upon her to teach her brothers penmanship, and neither boy took to such instruction willingly. She was
176
