“No; it is quite true,” cried poor Rachel--“_quite_ true. I should like to be your servant, and live with your mother. Oh! I ought to say,” she continued, raising herself with a little start and thrill of terror, “that if we were in a different position, and could meet people like equals, I should be so glad--so very glad to be friends.”
“But how odd Rachel would think it to live in Bellevue,” said Marian, coming to the rescue with a little happy ridicule, which did better than gravity, “and to see no one, even in the street, but the milkman and the greengrocer’s boy! for Rachel only thinks of the Willows and Winterbourne; she does not know in the least how things look in Bellevue.”
Rachel was beguiled into a laugh--a very unusual indulgence. “When you say that, I think it is a very little cottage like one of the cottages in the village; but you know that is all wrong. Oh, when do you think you will go to Winterbourne?”
“We will write and tell you,” said Agnes, “all about it, and how many are going; for I do not suppose Charlie will come, after all; and you will write to us--how often? Every other day?”
Rachel turned very red, then very pale, and looked at them with considerable dismay. “Write!” she said, with a falter in her voice; “I--I never thought of that--I never wrote to any one; I daresay I should do it very badly. Oh no; I shall be sure to find out whenever you come to the Old Wood Lodge.”
“But we shall hear nothing of you,” said Agnes. “Why should you not write to us? I am sure you do to your brother at home.”
“I do _not_,” said Rachel, once more drawing herself up, and with flashing eyes. “No one can write letters to us, who have no name.”
She was not to be moved from this point; she repeated the same words again and again, though with a very wistful and yielding look in her face. All for Louis! Her companions were obliged to give up the question, after all.
So there was another weeping, sobbing, vehement embrace, and Rachel disappeared without a word into the big bare room down stairs--disappeared to fall again, without a struggle, into her former forlorn life--to yield on her own account, and to struggle with fierce haughtiness for the credit of Louis--leaving the two sisters very thoughtful and compassionate, and full of a sudden eager generous impulse to run away with and take her home.