She left the room, and in a very short time afterward Caroline heard the carriage drive off; but for nearly three long hours she never moved from her seat, so utterly miserable, as scarcely even to change her position. Never in her life before, not in her most angry moments, had she so spoken to her mother, and her remorse was almost intolerable. Again and again she remembered what Mrs. Hamilton had told her so often, that, if she did not strive and pray against the dominion of ill-temper while young, it would become more and more uncontrollable, and the older she became, the more difficult to subdue, even in a moderate degree; and her words were indeed true. It had been many months since temper had gained such an ascendency, and its effects were far, far more violent, and its power over her more determined, and if, as she grew older, it should be still worse, what would become of her? how insufferably wretched? what would she not have given to have recalled her words? The jealousy which had arisen, now she knew not how, had sunk into air before those few calm inquiring sentences from her mother, and in her excessive misery every kind deed and word and look, every fond indulgence and forbearance, in fact, all the love her mother had so lavished on her from her infancy, rushed back upon her, till she actually hated herself, and longed the more intensely for the comfort of that soothing affection, which, in real pain or childish sorrow, had never been refused her.
"Why, why did Annie tell me any thing about that hateful ball?" she exclaimed, at length, as the sound of many joyous voices and the dressing-bell proclaimed the return of the various members of her family only in time to prepare for dinner. "It was all, all from that; I know now, only from that one thought--one wish. Why was I such a fool, as not to tell mamma at once that I knew I was to be asked, and wished so much to go?--if she had refused me, it would not have been half the pain I have made for myself. And how can I meet papa's eye and Percy's unkind jokes with eyes like these?" she added, as on rising to go to her own room, she caught sight of her own face in a mirror, and actually started at the disfigurement which the violence of her emotion had wrought. "Oh, how I wish mamma had not desired me to go to her; that I could but hide myself from every body--or get rid of this horrible black cloud."