It had
rendered her uneasy; she had felt shy and uncomfortable. Once or
twice she had been on the point of saying to Mrs. Brookes that she
thought her cousin and Eppy very oddly familiar, but had failed of
courage. It was no wonder therefore that she should be more
cheerful.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
ARCTURA AND SOPHIA.
About this time her friend, Miss Carmichael, returned from a rather
lengthened visit. But after the atonement that had taken place
between her and Donal, it was with some anxiety that lady Arctura
looked forward to seeing her. She shrank from telling her what had
come about through the wonderful poem, as she thought it, which had
so bewitched her. She shrank too from showing her the verses: they
were not of a kind, she was sure, to meet with recognition from her.
She knew she would make game of them, and that not good-humouredly
like Kate, who yet confessed to some beauty in them. For herself,
the poem and the study of its growth had ministered so much
nourishment to certain healthy poetic seeds lying hard and dry in
her bosom, that they had begun to sprout, indeed to shoot rapidly
up. Donal's poem could not fail therefore to be to her thenceforward
something sacred. A related result also was that it had made her
aware of something very defective in her friend's constitution: she
did not know whether in her constitution mental, moral, or
spiritual: probably it was in all three.
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