Mrs. Hannay kept her word and wrote to Miss Virtue, and the evening
after she returned to school Isobel was summoned to her room.
"I am sorry to say, I have a very bad account of you from your
mother. She says you are a passionate and wicked girl. How is it,
dear; you are not passionate here, and I certainly do not think
you are wicked?"
"I can't help it when I am at home, Miss Virtue. I am sure I try to
be good, but they won't let me. They don't like me because I can't
be always tidy and what they call prettily behaved, and because I
hate walking on the parade and being stuck up and unnatural, and
they don't like me because I am not pretty, and because I am thin
and don't look, as mamma says, a credit to her; but it is not that
so much as because of Robert. You know he is deformed, Miss Virtue,
and they don't care for him, and he has no one to love him but me,
and it makes me mad to see him treated so. That is what it was she
wrote about. I told her they treated him like a dog and so they
do," and she burst into tears.
"But that was very naughty, Isobel," Miss Virtue said gravely. "You
are only eleven years old, and too young to be a judge of these
matters, and even if it were as you say, it is not for a child to
speak so to her mother."
"I know that, Miss Virtue, but how can I help it? I could cry out
with pain when I see Robert looking from one to the other just for
a kind word, which he never gets. It is no use, Miss Virtue; if it
was not for him I would much rather never go home at all, but stop
here through the holidays, only what would he do if I didn't go
home? I am the only pleasure he has.
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