Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/177

 "Do you like that Miss Verrol?" some one asked her once rather dubiously, and Cecily looked at her interrogator in a startled, half-awed fashion.

"She is so clever, you know," she replied, irrelevantly as it seemed, glancing furtively behind her as she spoke.

Gretchen was still an object of as much wondering reverence to Cecily a year afterwards as she had been during the first week of their acquaintance, when Miss Verrol had already summed up her impressions of the latter, once and for all.

She practically knew Cecily, as she remarked to herself, after the first day, and at the end of the first week she proceeded to recapitulate and to get her by heart. An easy task! So easy that she had to sit and look at her with an air of critical wonder.

They were reading German. That is, Gretchen was. She had been pronouncing the words with great distinctness, and Cecily, with laborious effort after imitation, had made strange and weird sounds, unlike any language that was ever imagined, far less spoken. Presently Gretchen's voice stopped, and it was then that Cecily began to move restlessly, raising apprehensive eyes to those which her companion bent quietly upon her. The silence became a little oppressive; Cecily fidgeted, dropped her eyes, and began to pull the blotting-paper to pieces with nervous fingers. Gretchen laid a hand upon it, and quietly drew it away.

"It is no good for you to read this," said Miss Verrol at last, calmly.

"No," meekly assented Cecily.

"We've tried French—you don't seem to understand anything of that."

"No," she repeatedly hopelessly.

"Tell me—you don't really care for music, reading, poetry, pictures, do you?"

This