Recalled to Life eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 211 pages of information about Recalled to Life.

Recalled to Life eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 211 pages of information about Recalled to Life.

After breakfast, I steeled myself for the task, and broke it to them gently that, thinking it over in the night, I’d come to the conclusion I couldn’t consistently accept their proffered welcome.

“I don’t know how to say no to you,” I cried, “after you’ve been so wonderfully kind and nice; but reasons which I can’t fully explain just now make me feel it would be wrong of me to think of stopping with you.  It would hamper my independence of action to be in anybody else’s house.  I must shift for myself, and try if I can’t find board and lodging somewhere.”

“Find it with us then!” Elsie put in eagerly.  “If that’s all that’s the matter, I’m sure we’re not proud—­are we, Jack?—­not a bit.  Sooner than you should go elsewhere and be uncomfortable in your rooms, I’d take you in myself, and board you and look after you.  You could pay what you like; and then you’d retain your independence, you see, as much as ever you wanted.”

But her brother interrupted her with a somewhat graver air: 

“It goes deeper than that, I’m afraid, Elsie,” he said, turning his eye full upon her.  “If Miss Callingham feels she couldn’t be happy in stopping with us, she’d better try elsewhere.  Though where on earth we can put her, I haven’t just now the very slightest idea.  But we’ll turn it over in our own minds before we reach Adolphus Town.”

There was a sweet reasonableness about Jack that attracted me greatly.  I could see he entered vaguely into the real nature of my feelings.  But he wouldn’t cross-question me:  he was too much of a gentleman.

“Miss Callingham knows her own motives best,” he said more than once, when Elsie tried to return to the charge.  “If she feels she can’t come to us, we must be content to do the best we can for her with our neighbours.  Perhaps Mrs. Walters would take her in:  she’s our clergyman’s wife, Miss Callingham, and you mightn’t feel the same awkwardness with her as with my sister.”

“Does she know—­Dr. Ivor?” I faltered out, unable to conceal my real reasons entirely.

“Not so intimately as we do,” Jack answered, with a quick glance at his sister.  “We might ask her at any rate.  There are so few houses in Palmyra or the neighbourhood where you could live as you’re accustomed, that we mustn’t be particular.  But at least you’ll spend one night with us, and then we can arrange all the other things afterward.”

My mind was made up.

“No, not even one night,” I said.  I couldn’t accept hospitality from Dr. Ivor’s friends.  Between his faction and mine there could be nothing now but the bitterest enmity.  How dare I even parley with people who were friends of my father’s murderer?

Yet I was sorry to disappoint that good fellow, Jack, all the same.  Did he want me to sleep one night at his house on purpose to rob me and murder me?  Girl as I was, and rendered timorous in some ways by the terrible shocks I had received, I couldn’t for one moment believe it.  I knew he was good:  I knew he was honourable, gentle, a gentleman.

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Recalled to Life from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.