"But she _is_ like her mother," said Aunt Merce.

"Well, Cassy, good-by"; and he gave me a kiss with cruel nonchalance.
I knew my year must be stayed out.






CHAPTER VII.


My life at Grandfather Warren's was one kind of penance and my life
in Miss Black's school another. Both differed from our home-life.
My filaments found no nourishment, creeping between the two; but
the fibers of youth are strong, and they do not perish. Grandfather
Warren's house reminded me of the casket which imprisoned the Genii.
I had let loose a Presence I had no power over--the embodiment of its
gloom, its sternness, and its silence.

With feeling comes observation; after that, one reasons. I began to
observe. Aunt Mercy was not the Aunt Merce I had known at home. She
wore a mask before her father. There was constraint between them;
each repressed the other. The result of this relation was a formal,
petrifying, unyielding system,--a system which, from the fact of its
satisfying neither, was kept up the more rigidly; on the one side
from a morbid conscience, which reiterated its monitions against
the dictates of the natural heart; on the other, out of respect and