"I am so pleased!" she burst out, clapping her hands, as soon as he released them. "Wish me joy, good father! I have such happy news! My dear kind mamma! And she writes to me herself! I knew the silk that fastened it even before I saw her hand on the cover. Such good news! Oh, I am so pleased! so pleased!"
She would have danced for pure joy had she not remembered she was nearly eighteen. Also perhaps—for a girl's heart is very pitiful—she may have had some faint shadowy conception that the news so delightful to herself would be less welcome to her companion.
He was looking at her with the admiration in his heart shining out of his deep dark eyes.
"You have not told me what your good news is, my daughter," he observed, in a tone that made her glance into and away from his face, but that sobered the effervescence of her gaiety like a charm.
"It is a long letter from mamma!" she said, "and a whole month before I expected one. Judge if that is not charming. But, better still, I am to go back to her very soon. I am to live with her at the Hotel Montmirail. She is fitting up my apartment already. I am to quit the convent when my quarter is out!"
He knew it was coming. There is always consciousness of a blow for a moment before it falls.
"Then you have but a few more days to remain in Normandy," replied the young priest; and again the change in his voice arrested her attention. "My daughter, will you not regret the happy hours you have spent here, the quiet, the repose of the convent, and—and—the loving friends you leave behind?"
He glanced round while he spoke, and thought how different the white walls, the drooping branches, the lawn, the flower-beds, and the walk beneath the beeches would look when she was gone.
"Of course I shall never cease to love all those I have known here," she answered; and her eye met his own fearlessly, while there was no tinge of sorrow such as he would have liked to detect in her voice. "But I am going home, do you see! home to my dear mamma; and I shall be in Paris, and assist at operas, and balls, and fêtes. My father! I fear, I shall like it—oh! so much!"
