CHAPTER V.


MY FIRST SECRET.

I was one morning with my uncle in his room. Lessons were over, and I was
reading a marvellous story in one of my favourite annuals: my uncle had
so taught me from infancy the right handling of books, that he would have
trusted me with the most valuable in his possession. I do not know how
old I was, but that is no matter; man or woman is aged according to the
development of the conscience. Looking up, I saw him stooping over an
open drawer in a cabinet behind the door. I sat on the great chest under
the gable-window, and was away from him the whole length of the room. He
had never told me not to look at him, had never seemed to object to the
presence of my eyes on anything he did, and as a matter of course I sat
observing him, partly because I had never seen any portion of that
cabinet open. He turned towards the sky-light near him, and held up
between him and it a small something, of which I could just see that it
was red, and shone in the light. Then he turned hurriedly, threw it in
the drawer, and went straight out, leaving the drawer open. I knew I had
lost his company for the day.

The moment he was gone, the phantasm of the pretty thing he had been
looking at so intently, came back to me. Somehow I seemed to understand
that I had no right to know what it was, seeing my uncle had not shown it
me! At the same time I had no law to guide me. He had never said I was