QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER XVI. LILY BEGINS TO LEARN THINGS.

RHODODENDRON HOUSE was to Lily a mysterious
monster, a dragon that devoured children.
After the first "getting-up bell," the first
prayer-meeting, and the first school breakfast,
he gobbled her up; and she, a very small
Jonah indeed, became absorbed in him, and
dwelt in his immensity. Of the great boiling,
turbid sea of the external world she could know
nothing— the dragon's jaws formed the entrance
to the school, and were garnished with many
fangs. So she abode within, and at first trembled,
but gradually grew accustomed to the arched-inwards,
and ribbed sides, and vast viscera of the
monster; and, as it was her nature to love things
when she became accustomed to them, the school
dragon lost, at last, all his terrors for the child,
and Lily became that exceeding rarity, a little
girl who was fond of her school.

Quite alone, she had nothing else in the world
to be fond of. The people who had brought her
to school had forgotten to put any toys among
her needments. Her exquisite papa had, probably,
never heard of such vulgar frivolities, and
Jean Baptiste Constant had, perhaps, matters
more important to think of at the moment.
Lily had not so much as a doll. The rough old
playthings she used to potter about with in the
plasterer's house soon faded into the nothingness
of oblivion. So, too, did the plasterer himself,
and his wife her old nurse, and their little boy
her foster-brother. First, she forgot their names,
and only bore them in mind as the good people
far away, who used to be fond of her, and romp
with her, and bear with her little tempers. Then,
the plasterer's face and form began to be a
matter of doubt, and she could not tell whether
he had red hair or black hair— whether he wore a
beard, or whiskers, or both, or neither. Curiously,
she remembered latest, his strong ribbed corduroy
trousers— probably because she had careered on
them so many times cockhorse to Coventry, and
she connected with these garments the strong
acrid fumes of the tobacco he smoked. Blue
vapour, hot and pungent, was always curling
from that excellent man; without his pipe, Lily
would have lost her last definite conception of
her foster-father. But the pipe went out at last,
and the smoke mingled with the clouds, and
drifted away into space. The boy, her playmate,
she forgot in one sudden landslip of recollection.
He was there, for a moment, with a rough head
she used to touzle, a top he used to spin for her
amusement, a back that was always at her service.
He was her horse, her dog, her coach, her ship,
her steam-engine, but all at once his fastenings
loosened, and he tumbled down into the gulf for
ever. And then, last of all, poor nurse went.
Lily clung to her image as long as ever she could,
and struggled hard to retain it, but the inevitable
law asserted it, and nurse melted away. She
came to have two faces, like Janus, and then,
none at all. Her hands and feet disappeared in
a wreath of filmy imaginations. Long after that,
her checked apron remained— the apron on
which Lily used to sit before the fire, warm and
dry and glowing from her bath, purring like a
kitten— the apron which had strings to be pulled,
and twisted, and untied by her uncertain little
fingers, to the great discomfort, but never-failing
delight of the good woman— the apron to whose
corner Lily used to cling in her first venturesome
excursions into the back garden. But the apron
was doomed. The records of that court of
exchequer crumbled into decay, and away went
nurse, apron, and all, not to be remembered
again on this side death, when— oh! joy for
some, and woe unutterable for others— we shall
remember everything.

This last holdfast being taken away, what remained?
Rhododendron House, and nothing
more. The apparition of the two strange men
who had brought her by night to school had
scarcely ruffled the surface of the lake, had
scarcely breathed upon the mirror. They could
scarcely have been forgotten, for they had never
been remembered. When the Miss Bunnycastles
spoke to Lily about her papa, and told her that
he was a perfect gentleman, and brought a
man-servant with him who was almost as grand a
gentleman as he, she could respond only by a
vacant stare. She knew no papa. Little by
little, there came over her a vague consciousness
that she ought properly to have one, for most
of the young ladies were continually vaunting
their possession of such a parent; and when she
was about six, she toddled up one day to Mr.
Drax, when he was paying one of his periodical
visits, and with a very grave and knowledge-seeking