There seemed to lurk in his mind a sense of injury, which he
visited upon her in sarcastic gibes and allusions to the Forest,
taunting her with impatience to have done with him and begone to her
dearer friends. Bessie resented this for a little while, but by and by
she ceased to be affected, and treated it as the pettishness of a sick
old man, never used to be considerate for others. He kept her very much
confined and gave her scant thanks for her care of him. If Mr. Cecil
Burleigh admired patience and forbearance in a woman, he had the
opportunity of studying a fair example of both in her. He pitied her
secretly, but she put on no martyr-airs. "It is nothing. Oh no,
grandpapa is not difficult--it is only his way. Most people are testy
when they are ill," she would plead, and she believed what she said. The
early sense of repulsion and disappointment once overcome, she was too
sensible to bewail the want of unselfish affection where it had never
existed before.
The squire had certain habits of long standing--habits of coldness,
distance, reserve, and he never changed materially. He survived through
the ensuing autumn and winter, and finally sank during the
north-easterly weather of the following spring, just two years after the
death of his son Frederick. Jonquil and Macky, who had been all his life
about him, were his most acceptable attendants. He did not care to have
his son Laurence with him, and when the children came over it was not by
his invitation.
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