Lavinia

“I shall never get over it.”

This is a phrase that has issued from the same lips very often before; and in general Lavinia Carew listens to it silently, in the impatient confidence that at her next visit to Mrs. Prince, that lady will have got over “it” so completely as to have forgotten that “it” ever existed. She is silent now, but from an opposite reason to that which has hitherto tied her tongue. In her opinion neither Mrs. Prince nor any other Mrs. or Miss could ever get over the “it” in question.

“And coming on this joyful day too—a day, I mean, that is so joyful to every one else in England—that would have been so joyful to us, but for this!” The speaker breaks off with a whimper.

“The anniversary of Majuba Hill!” says Lavinia, with a fighting glint in a pair of uncommonly clear eyes, and uttering her ejaculation with none the less gusto for its being absolutely unoriginal, and shared by almost every pair of lips in Great and Greater Britain this triumphal day.

“After the terrible gloom of the winter—never even in the Crimean War do I remember anything comparable to it!—just when the dead weight seemed to be lifting a little from all our hearts,” pursues Mrs. Prince, raising to heaven her bangled wrists with a despairing jangle.

“The village is full of little Union Jacks,” interrupts the girl, with a good-natured effort to keep her afflicted friend on the safe track of the public rejoicing, and also because she cannot quite restrain the expression of her own jubilation. “I cannot think where they all came from.”

But the waving of no bunting before it can hide out the spectacle which is turning the national triumph to eclipse before the elder woman’s vision.

“I suppose that I ought not to have told even you,” she continues, resisting with mild doggedness her young friend’s attempt to distract her thoughts, even momentarily, from her woes—not having, indeed, a mind hospitable enough often to admit two ideas abreast within its narrow portals. “No; I suppose that I certainly ought not to have revealed our disgrace even to you; but what was I to do? I had to tell some one—to seek for sympathy somewhere. I get none at home. I suppose that Mr. Prince feels it; but he says nothing. He is like a stone.”