Colwood's belief, now insolently
and now anxiously, aware of it.
Insolence!--that really, if one came to think of it, had been the note
of Miss Merton's whole behavior from the beginning--an ill-concealed,
hardly restrained insolence, toward the girl, two years older than
herself, who had received her with such tender effusion, and was,
moreover, in a position to help her so materially. What could it--what
did it mean?
Mrs. Colwood stood at the foot of the stairs a moment, lost in a trance
of wonderment. Her heart was really sore for Diana's disappointment, for
the look in her face, as she left the house. How on earth could the
visit be shortened and the young lady removed?
The striking of three o'clock reminded Muriel Colwood that she was to
take the new-comer out for an hour. They had taken coffee in the
morning-room up-stairs, Diana's own sitting-room, where she wrote her
letters and followed out the lines of reading her father had laid down
for her. Mrs. Colwood returned thither; found Miss Merton, as it seemed
to her, in the act of examining the letters in Diana's blotting-book;
and hastily proposed to her to take a turn in the garden.
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