This was practically an assertion, though put in the form of a question. Cecily felt compelled to reply.
"No," she acknowledged again, faintly.
Gretchen continued to look at her.
"It is very curious," she remarked critically, as though she had come upon a totally new species and was interested.
Cecily suddenly dropped her fair head upon her arms, and burst into tears.
Miss Verrol waited silently till the storm was passed. There was a glass opposite, and she looked across at it as the girl raised her tear-stained face.
"It doesn't matter," she said in the same critical tone. "You are pretty enough to make it of no consequence. You even look pretty when you cry. Now, I look hideous."
This was the first and only spoken allusion to Cecily's mental deficiencies that Gretchen ever made. The reading and music practising went on regularly as usual, and Cecily still persevered in her frantic attempts at the German accent. If there was the slightest trace of weariness in Gretchen's tone as she corrected her for the fourth or fifth time in one word, it was so faint as to be only just appreciable, and when at the end of the hour Cecily stole an apprehensive glance at her face, it was always calm and imperturbable.
"Now we will have the duet," was what she usually said as she closed the book. Indeed, her patience during the hours devoted to "mental culture" was altogether admirable, and if signs of Cecily's lack of intelligence had been otherwise wanting, they would have been supplied by the fact that, while humbly recognising the goodness and wisdom of Gretchen, and striving earnestly to be worthy of it, she would yet have found it a relief if the latter had sometimes lost her temper.
