Married or Single? , Volume I by B. M. Croker

Three months had passed, and still no sign or token from Mr. Robert West. How anxiously his daughter's eyes followed Miss Selina's skinny fingers, as they dealt out the letters every morning during breakfast time -- these letters having previously been thoroughly turned over, examined, felt, and even _smelt_, by that lady and her relatives. It was always the same in answer to Madeline's unspoken appeal. "No, nothing for you, Madeline," or, "No letter yet, Miss West," according to the frame of mind in which Miss Selina found herself. And then Mrs. Harper, who was seated behind an immense copper tea apparatus, would peer round it, with her keen little eyes and bobbing grey curls, and shake her head at the pupil-teacher, in a manner which signified that she did not approve of her at all! As if poor Madeline was not sick with hope deferred, and wild with a frenzied desire to get away and never pass another night under that lady's roof-tree; only there was one big _but_, one immense drawback to her own most eager wishes, she had nowhere else to go.

The Miss Harpers, who were fully alive to Madeline's value, were by no means equally anxious for her departure. She corrected exercises, ruled copybooks, relieved them of several distasteful duties, and took the little ones' music -- an agonizing ordeal. She really did as much as any two paid teachers, and -- an ecstatic fact -- for nothing! Moreover, they had the delicious sensation that they were performing a charitable action all the time, and looked primly self-conscious and benevolent when their friends exclaimed: "How good of you, you dear, kind, Christian people, to keep that unfortunate Australian girl!"