Innocent rose, more to avoid controversy than from any interest in the house. Nelly showed her a great many interesting things in the attics; an old screen, which you or I, dear reader, would have given our ears for; a whole set of old oak furniture, which had once been in the library; old prints, turned with their faces to the wall; and one or two family portraits. The girl moved quite unaffected through all these delights. She neither knew their value nor saw their beauty. She answered Nelly’s questions with yes or no, and vaguely longed to get away again. To do what?--nothing. Once, and only once, she was moved a little. It was when Nelly introduced her into the old schoolroom, a bare room, with a sloping roof and two windows, looking away over the elms to the suburban road some distance off, which led into London, and showed moving specks of figures, carriages, and people, diminished by the distance, over the bare tops of the trees. There were neither curtains nor carpets in this bare place. It was cold and deserted, apart from the other rooms, up a little staircase by itself. Innocent gave a cry of something like pleasure when she went in. “I like this room,” she said, and it was about the first unsuggested observation she had made since her arrival. “May I come and live here?” “Here! far away from us all?” cried Nelly, “with no furniture, no pictures, nothing to make you cheerful! It would seem like banishment to put you here. You do not mean to say you like this bare little place?” “Yes,” said the girl, “I can breathe here. I can see out of the windows; and I should not trouble anybody. I like this best.” “Innocent, you must not talk of troubling anybody. All that troubles us is when we think you are not happy.” “I should be happy here,” she said wistfully, sitting down on the ledge of the window, which was low, and turning her gaze to the distant road. “Oh, Innocent!” said Nelly, half inclined to cry in her disappointment; “if you knew how much I wished to make your room pretty, how I worked at it, and how anxious mamma and I were to make it look like home to you! We thought you would feel less lonely if you were close to us, and felt that we were within call night and day. We hoped you would grow fond of us, Innocent! You don’t really mean that you would like to get away from mamma and me?” To this appeal Innocent made no immediate answer. She looked far away over the tree tops, and watched the omnibuses, crawling like flies along the road. It was not a beautiful or exciting sight, but it soothed her somehow, like “the woven paces and the waving hands” of Merlin’s spell--the subtle influence of motion apart from herself, which acted upon her like a cadence and rhythm. Then she said slowly, as if to herself, “I like this best.”