Inheritance and succession -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction; Man-woman relationships -- Fiction
When Reine was left alone she did not even then make any remark to
herself upon mamma’s eagerness to get away to her children, whose very
names on ordinary occasions the girl disliked to hear. To punish and to
school herself now she recalled them deliberately; Jeannot and Camille
and little Babette, all French to their finger-tips, spoilt children,
whose ears the English sister, herself trained in nursery proprieties
under Miss Susan’s rule, had longed to box many times. She resolved now
to buy some of the carved wood which haunts the traveller at every
corner in Switzerland, for them, and be very good to them when she saw
them again. Oh, how good Reine meant to be! Tender visions of an ideal
purity arose in her mind. Herbert and she--the one raised from the brink
of the grave, the other still more blessed in receiving him from that
shadow of death--how could they ever be good enough, gentle enough, kind
enough, to show their gratitude? Reine’s young soul seemed to float in a
very heaven of gentler meanings, of peace with all men, of charity and
tenderness. Never, she vowed to herself, should poor man cross her path
without being the better for it; never a tear fall that she could dry.
Herbert, when she went to him, was much of the same mind. He had begun
to believe in himself and in life, with all those unknown blessings
which the boy had sweetly relinquished, scarcely knowing them, but which
now seemed to come back fluttering about his head on sunny wings, like
the swallows returning with the Summer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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