“You would like to go, of course?” said her father. At the sound of his voice she glanced up, and a whole set of new feelings took the place of the delighted ones that had filled her mind a moment before.
“How selfish I am!” she said to herself. “I’d quite forgotten that I’m dad’s housekeeper. Oh, I can’t go and leave him all alone with Ann! How lonely he’d be! And he might even get ill. Sybil can go, but I don’t see how I can!”
“Well! Well!” said her father irritably. “Have you nothing to say? Your aunt has been most generous; wants you both to get the advantage of good teaching--even suggests that she will pay for violin lessons for you----”
“Oh!” Gretta’s face crimsoned with pleasure at the idea. “Dad,” she ventured, “but could you spare me?”
“Spare you! Why not?” said her father. “It’ll be the making of you. I could never have afforded the school she has chosen, and the best thanks you can give her is to make the most of her offer. It is generous in the extreme.”
“But, dad,” ventured Gretta. “What would _you_ do? Wouldn’t you miss us?”
“Well, yes,” said her father. “But we can’t get good things for nothing in this world, and it’ll be worth while to be lonely at times if I know that you and Sybil are being turned out as your mother would have liked.” He opened his paper again, and Gretta said no more. So seldom did he speak of her mother that the child knew by his last remark that the arrangement was settled, and that he did not wish to say any more about it.
“But talk it over with your aunt when she brings back Sybil to-morrow,” he remarked, as he brushed his hat in the passage preparatory to starting on his rounds. “Good-bye, child; you mustn’t turn into a woman too soon, you know.”
He kissed her and banged the front door, and Gretta was left to a maze of excited thoughts: she _was_ to go to school; the decision had been taken out of her hands!
How much she longed to go she believed that no one in the whole world knew. No one? Well, perhaps her fiddle did, the child thought to herself; for Gretta, since her mother’s death, had been thrown very much upon her own resources, and she would have felt even more solitary and companionless had it not been for the hours she spent with her beloved violin.