There was little change the next day, until all at once she said in a
clear voice that she should like to see her master at the school,
Mr. Langdon. He came accordingly, and took the place of Helen at her
bedside. It seemed as if Elsie had forgotten the last scene with him.
Might it be that pride had come in, and she had sent for him only to
show how superior she had grown to the weakness which had betrayed her
into that extraordinary request, so contrary to the instincts and usages
of her sex? Or was it that the singular change which had come over her
had involved her passionate fancy for him and swept it away with her
other habits of thought and feeling? Or perhaps, rather, that she felt
that all earthly interests were becoming of little account to her, and
wished to place herself right with one to whom she had displayed a
wayward movement of her unbalanced imagination? She welcomed Mr.
Bernard as quietly as she had received Helen Darley. He colored at the
recollection of that last scene, when he came into her presence; but
she smiled with perfect tranquillity. She did not speak to him of any
apprehension; but he saw that she looked upon herself as doomed. So
friendly, yet so calm did she seem through all their interview, that Mr.
Bernard could only look back upon her manifestation of feeling towards
him on their walk from the school as a vagary of a mind laboring
under some unnatural excitement, and wholly at variance with the true
character of Elsie Venner, as he saw her before him in her subdued,
yet singular beauty. He looked with almost scientific closeness of
observation into the diamond eyes; but that peculiar light which he knew
so well was not there. She was the same in one sense as on that first
day when he had seen her coiling and uncoiling her golden chain, yet how
different in every aspect which revealed her state of mind and emotion!
Something of tenderness there was, perhaps, in her tone towards him;
she would not have sent for him, had she not felt more than an ordinary