She began at once to teach her music: the sooner a beginning was made the better! Her fingers were stiff, but so was her will: the way she stuck to her work was pathetic. Here also she understood quickly, but the doing of what she understood she found very hard--the more so that her spirit was but ill at ease. Corney had deceived her; he had done something wrong besides; she was parted from him, and could realize little of his surroundings; all was very different from what she had expected in marrying her Corney! Also, from her weariness and anxiety in nursing him, and from other causes as well, her health was not what it had been. Then Hester's letters were a little stiff! She felt it without knowing what she felt, or why they made her uncomfortable. It was from no pride or want of love they were such, but from her uncertainty--the discomfort of knowing they were no nearer a solution of their difficulty than when they parted at the railway: she did not even know yet what she was going to do in the matter! This prevented all free flow of communication. Unable to say what she would have liked to say, unwilling to tell the uncomfortable condition of things, there rose a hedge and seemed to sink a gulf between her and her sister. Amy therefrom, naturally surmised that the family was not willing to receive her, and that the same unwillingness though she was too good to yield to it, was in Hester also. It was not in her. How she might have taken his marriage had Corney remained respectable, I am not sure; but she knew that the main hope for her brother lay in his love for Amy and her devotion to him--in her common sense, her true, honest, bright nature. She was only far too good for Corney! Then again Amy noted, for love and anxiety made her very sharp, that Miss Dasomma did not read to her every word of Hester's letters. Once she stopped suddenly in the middle of a sentence, and after a pause went on with another! Something was there she was not to know! It might have some reference to her husband! If so, then something was not going right with him! Was he worse and were they afraid to tell her, lest she should go to him! Perhaps they were treating him as her aunts treated her--making his life miserable--and she not with him to help him to bear it! All no doubt because she had married him! It explained his deceiving her! If he had told them, as he ought to have done, they would not have let her have him at all, and what would have become of her without her Corney! He ought not certainly to have told her lies, but if anything could excuse him, so that making the best of things, and excusing her husband all she could, she was in danger of lowering her instinctively high sense of moral obligation. She brooded over the matter but not long, she threw herself on her knees, and begged her friend to let her know what the part of her sister's letter she had not read to her was about.