and Miss Alice is in one of her lofty moods,
and declines to help anybody, or else the
common cry when we are in a difficulty
over our subjects is, " O!  Miss Alice, do
give me an idea! " and sometimes she will
write us a good half-page.

Ever since that scene about the box she
and I have scarcely spoken.  I do feel a
little bit vexed and ashamed of myself when
I remember it, and some of the girls have
taken upon themselves to quarrel with me
about it.  They say I insulted her—I did
not intend it, and I don't believe she thinks
I did.  I fancy often since I began to observe
her that she has a heart under her satire, but
she takes a great deal of pains to keep it
hidden.  Emily Clay does not dislike her;
indeed, she insists upon it that if she had
not been so harshly treated when she was a
child and since she came to Stockbridge, she
would have been more affectionate and
faithful than any of us.  Miss Smallwood is
horrid to her, but she never seems to care,
and though she is slaving from morning till
night, Miss Thoroton scolds her every day.
She is dreadfully impertinent sometimes—
indeed, she always appears ready-armed for
repelling an attack, and such cutting, bitter
things she can say!  So very different from
Emily Clay! she is nice.

September the nineteenth.—Miss Alice has
been put into my room, and Emily Clay
moved to another.  Miss Thoroton said she
would not have any clanning in the school,
and Emily and I were too much together.
Then we are not allowed to be companions
in our walks, but each of us is classed with
a girl we care nothing about.  Now, I call
this enough to make us deceitful and under-
hand!  Why cannot we be allowed our
natural affections as we are elsewhere?  I
will walk with Emily, and I will talk with
her too, whenever I can, for all the Miss
Thoroton's in the universe!  Miss Smallwood,
too, has taken a spite against us, and
if we are together in recreation time, she
immediately sends one of us off to the piano
or elsewhere.  Miss Alice is quite as much
vexed as we are, but we have to submit.
This is such oppressive hot weather, and we
have had ever so many bad thunderstorms
lately.  I don't like Stockbridge as a place—
letting alone its being a school.  There is a
great, ugly marsh beyond our garden, and it
is damp and steamy, so different to dear old
Burnbank.  Some of the girls are not well,
and I am not well either, though I don't in
the least know what ails me; I get tired with
nothing, and my head aches miserably often,
but I don't like to complain.

October the twenty-ninth.—O! what a time
I have had of it!  And now I am all full
of aching bones, and pains, and languors!
I can scarcely trail one foot after another,
and the least noise almost makes me scream.
I have had a rheumatic fever for nearly six
weeks, and have suffered so very, very much
—it was like being racked.  Now I can sit
up in the little music-room, and Grannie is
staying in the town to be near me.  They
took great care of me and were very kind.
Miss Thoroton, Miss Smallwood, Mademoiselle,
Emily, and all of them; but it was
Miss Alice who nursed me best.  The two
girls who slept in the other bed were moved,
and she and I were left alone for quiet.  I
don't know how I can have thought all the
cruel things of her that I have done ever
since I came to Stockbridge until I began to
be ill.  She is so patient and good.  One
night when I was the weakest I cried, and
made confession to her, and asked her to
forgive me.  I was so weighed down with the
remembrance of what I used to feel against
her, that I could not rest until she kissed
me.  I awoke and found her sitting on the
floor, with her face resting against my bed,
watching me, and stroking my hand.  I knew
she had been practising in the drawing-room
until after ten, and that she would have to
be at her lessons for herself by five, and it
pained me inexpressibly to see her wasting
her few hours of sleep in guarding me.
Since that night I have found her out; she
never can be cold and repellant to me again,
for I must love her whether she will or no.
She did not say very much, but she kept still
a long while, and knelt by the bed with her
face on my hand, and I could feel it wet
with tears.  At last she asked me not to
talk any more, she could not bear it, and got
into her own bed.  I thought at first she
was gone to sleep, but by-and-by I heard a
sob, and another, and O! how she cried!  I
thought she would kill herself; I never
heard anybody cry so bitterly, or so long.  I
sat up—move I could not—and prayed her to
be calm, but she seemed to have lost all
control over herself, and could not cease.  I
know that feeling: I wanted to put my arms
about her and comfort her, and to tell her
there was one person would love her always,
always, but I might as well have been tied to
my bed, so utterly helpless was I with pain
and weakness.

She fell asleep at length, and so did I, and
the next morning she said very quietly,
"You must not tell, Eleanor Clare, what a
fool I was last night; you see I can bear
any amount of scolding and hatred with
equanimity, but the moment I get a glimpse
of affection I am broken up—it is the hazel
divining rod which shows where lie the
fountains of tears in me—don't you use it
again just yet."  And away she went to the
school-room.

I feel as if I loved her just now better
than any one else in the whole world; she
has a kind of power over me which I don't
acknowledge in anybody besides: whatever
she bade me do I should do it. I like to
watch her face as she sits by the window at
her frame-work (she gets a dispensation from
school business and keeps me company now