He stooped over me; he whispered: “I am going to ask you something; I insist on your answering, Yes or No.” He raised his voice, and drew himself back so that they could all see me.
“Have you been taught like your sister?” he asked. “Has the catechism that has been her religious lesson, for all her life, been your religious lesson, for all your life, too?”
I said: “Yes”--and I was in such a rage that I said it out loud. If Philip had handed me his cane, and had advised me to give the young hussies who were answerable for this dreadful state of things a good beating, I believe I should have done it. Papa turned his back on me and offered the girls a last chance: “Do you feel sorry for what you have done? Do you ask to be forgiven?”
Neither the one nor the other answered him. He called across the room to the teachers: “Those two pupils are expelled the school.”
Both the women looked horrified. The elder of the two approached him, and tried to plead for a milder sentence. He answered in one stern word: “Silence!”--and left the schoolroom, without even a passing bow to Philip. And this, after he had cordially shaken hands with my poor dear, not half an hour before.
I ought to have made affectionate allowance for his nervous miseries; I ought to have run after him, and begged his pardon. There must be something wrong, I am afraid, in girls loving anybody but their fathers. When Helena led the way out by another door, I ran after Philip; and I asked _him_ to forgive me.
I don’t know what I said; it was all confusion. The fear of having forfeited his fondness must, I suppose, have shaken my mind. I remember entreating Helena to say a kind word for me. She was so clever, she had behaved so well, she had deserved that Philip should listen to her. “Oh,” I cried out to him desperately, “what must you think of me?”
“I will tell you what I think of you,” he said. “It is your father who is in fault, Eunice--not you. Nothing could have been in worse taste than his management of that trumpery affair in the schoolroom; it was a complete mistake from beginning to end. Make your mind easy; I don’t blame You.”
“Are you, really and truly, as fond of me as ever?”
Helena seemed to be hardly as much interested in this happy ending of my anxieties as I might have anticipated. She walked on by herself. Perhaps she was thinking of poor papa’s strange outbreak of excitement, and grieving over it.