A Silver Brand — page 70: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

62 me ee A SILVER BRAND. CHAPTER VI. I WISH YOU HAD STAID AT HOME.” Rock House was in consternation, and the Foss family had retired to the library, for the eleventh time, to a consultation which ended, as the-pre- vious discussions had done, in. a hopeless dismay. “T’m sure I don’t know what to do with her,” ex- claimed even Theodosia, the invincible. “It will - never do to let her go ill. But how dare we disobey such a serious charge as that letter contained?” “Have you reasoned with her in every possible way?” asked Paul, ruefully. “You women ought to understand a girl’s whim.” “T’ve talked, and she listens respectfully enough,” responded Theodosia, “but when I get through, she just puts up her handkerchief and cries again, sob- bing, ‘I don’t want to-bea prisoner. If you want me to die, you will keep me shut up in this way.’ And I can’t make anything else out of her.” | “She has grown so .pale,” whimpered Rhoda; “don’t you see how her beautiful color has faded out? When I was helping her paint the mosses to- day, her hand trembled with nothing but weak- | ness.” “You give her air enough. She sits at the open window, don’t she?” questioned Urbanus, wrinkling his forehead into a tangled knot, in his perplexed thought. | | “Certainly,” responded Theodosia, in her quick, decisive way. “Air and sun enough, plenty. And I’ve given up requiring too much time to be de- _ voted to her lessons. I] confess I was rather too zealous at first. Iwas forcing her mind too. much. But I have remedied all that. Yet still she pines, aud grows pale, and weeps half her time. It doesn’t seem as if it could be all grieving just for freedom to wander about this dreary old island.” “Yet the eagle and the dove alike chafe against comicbooks.co