CHAPTER XIII.

THE SPIDER SPINS.

Julia got up from her bed the moment that her mother had gone. Her first
feeling was that her privacy had been shamefully outraged. A true mother
should honorably respect the reserve of the little child. But Julia was
now a woman, grown, with a woman's spirit. She rose from her bed, and
shut her window with a bang that was meant to be a protest. She then put
the tenpenny nail sometimes used to fasten the window down, in its
place, as if to say, "Come in, if you can." Then she pulled out the
folds of the chintz curtain, hanging on its draw-string half-way up the
window. If there had been any other precaution possible, she would have
taken it. But there was not.

She took up the note, and read it. Julia was not a girl of keen
penetration. Her training was that of a country life. She did not read
between the lines of August's note, and could only understand that she
was dismissed. Outraged by her mother's tyranny, spurned by her lover,
she stood like a hunted creature, brought to bay, looking for the last
desperate chance for escape.

Crushed? No. If she had been weaker, if she had been of the quieter,
frailer sort, instead of being, as she was, elastic, impulsive,
recuperative, she might have been crushed. She was wounded in her heart
of hearts, but all her pride and hardihood, of which she had not a
little, had now taken up arms against outrageous fortune. She was stung
at every thought of August and his letter, of Betsey Malcolm and her