Orphan Bride Read Online Free PDF

exclaimed wonderingly. “Dear me! What have you been doing with yourself all this time?”
    “Well,” said Jennet, “I did wash up for Mrs. Dingle, but I don’t think she was very pleased. Then I had some tea, and then I made the toast.
    “Dear me!” he said again, and shaking his head sadly, went off and into the other part of the house.
    Jennet had decided to say nothing about getting up so early, but Homer informed them all of the fact at breakfast.
    “And do you know, my dear Emily, she even washed the dishes and had small thanks from Mrs. D.”
    “What dishes?” asked Em i ly vaguely.
    “The dishes of the night before, probably. Your Mrs. Dingle’s a slummick, and so I’ve always told you,” said Julian. He looked better after his night’s res t and seemed to have lost much of his irritability.
    “ She may be a slummick, but she suits us,” Emily replied blandly. “Jennet, my dear, you must not upset the arrangements of the house. It is quite unnecessary to get up at six o’clock and wash dishes. You will be called at seven-thirty.”
    “Yes, Miss Dane,” said Jennet.
    “Jeannette—I mean Jennet!”
    “Aunt Emily!” Jennet amended hastily.
    “I still think you should speak to Mrs. D., Emily,” continued Homer. “It is most ungrateful of her.”
    “That’s enough, Homer,” Emily said placidly. “We all quite understand. Jennet, dear, if you have finished, you may leave the table.”
    Jennet went into the living room, where a fire burned fitfully, and sat down. She supposed that sooner or later someone would come and tell her what her duties were to be. Her eyes wandered round the room and she noticed the long shelves of books which flanked one wall. She left her chair and knelt down by the books, scrut i nizing them anxiously. Dickens ... Dickens ... everybody had Dickens ... A h, here he was. She extracted Oliver Twist and sat back on her heels, reading with avidity.
    Julian found her there nearly an hour later, and watched her in silence for a moment before he asked: “What are you reading?”
    She started guiltily.
    “I—I was only waiting to be told what I should do,” she stammered.
    He leant on his stick, looking down at her with an amused expression.
    “You’re supposed to do what you like,” he said. “What were you reading?”
    She held up the book, and he raised his eyebrows. “Dickens—at this hour of the morning!” he remarked.
    “We were reading it aloud in the orphanage,” she explained. “We had just got to the part where Oliver asks for more, and I wanted to find out what happened.”
    “Painfully suitable reading for an orphanage,” remarked Julian dryly.
    She did not understand him and put the volume back with its fellows, feeling she should not have touched it.
    “So you read the classics at Blacker’s,” Julian said, dropping into a chair and filling his pipe.
    “We’ve read most of Dickens and Scott, and some Jane Austen,” she told him dryly. “But on Sundays we have the lives of the martyrs. I don’t like them much . ”
    “You don’t approve of dying for your faith and wearing a martyr’s crown?”
    She looked distressed.
    “I don’t know. I think I’m not very brave, and a martyr’s crown seems awfully little compensation.”
    He laughed.
    “You and I should get on,” he said dryly. “I also think it’s awfully little compensation.”
    Jennet was dimly aware that he was thinking of his shattered leg, but she did not understand him and wished he would get up and go away.
    He looked at her hands and said, as if it were an accusation:
    “You have chilblains.”
    She sat on them hurriedly.
    “You must take care of your hands,” he told her. “They are the first things a man usually looks at.”
    She said nothing, thinking that the hands of the average orphan with her way to make in the world were of little consequence to a prospective employer.
    “You’d better get out on the moor,” he said abruptly. “Fresh air is what you