Futile hope! Before many months were over, Queenie bitterly rued the false step she had taken, and grew sullen with a sense of repressed wrong. Little Emmie drooped and pined in the unloving and uncongenial atmosphere. The poor little sensitive plant grew mentally dwarfed; the young shoots ceased to expand. Queenie could have wrung her hands with anguish when she thought of her own weakness and impotence to avert the mischief. Emmie's bright intelligence grew blunted; a constant system of fault-finding and rigorous punishment cowed and stupefied the child's timid spirit; only kindness and judicious training could avail with such a nature. Emmie did not grow sullen, her temper was too sweet and mild to harbor resentful feelings; but she became morbid and over sensitive. Deprived of the recreation natural to children, her imagination became unhealthily developed; she peopled the old garret with fancies, and not infrequently raised a Frankenstein of her own creation. Queenie sometimes found her cowering in the window recess in the twilight in a perfect stupor of terror, for which she could give no tangible reason. It was dark, and she was afraid, and she did not like to come down into the schoolroom, as she was in disgrace with Fraulein, and so on. Poor pitiful fragments out of a child's life, small every-day tyrannies, little seeds of unkindness dropped into virgin soil, to bring forth perhaps a terrible harvest. Queenie's passionate love could not shield the little sister; the two could only cling to each other in mute sorrow, each trying to hide from the other how much they suffered. "I am only tolerably miserable," Emmie would say sometimes, in her droll, unchildish way. "Don't cry, Queenie; you and I and dear old Caleb will live together some day I know, when I am a woman perhaps, and then we shall forget all our troubles," and Emmie would hide the little blackened hand on which Fraulein's ruler had come down so sharply that day, and say nothing of the pain, for fear Queenie should fret. But with all her childish troubles, Emmie suffered less than the elder sister. Queenie would lie awake with aching head and throbbing pulses night after night, revolving schemes for delivering them both from the house of bondage, as she phrased it. And every night Emmie prayed her poor little prayer that she might not hate Miss Titheridge, and that she and Queenie and Caleb might live together in a little house all by themselves. Emmie was never weary of describing this ideal house. It must have four rooms and a cupboard, and a little garden in front, where they might grow sweet peas and roses. "I should hate to be rich; should not you, Queenie?" she would say sometimes. "Caleb would not be able to smoke his long pipes then."