Page:Authors daughter v1.djvu/212

when the point was insisted on, she, with Allan's help,fixed a very moderate sum as sufficient remuneration, and she felt rather important at the idea of her own livelihood at fifteen. She had sometimes difficulty in maintaining discipline with the tall girls who were her ostensible pupils; but Allan and Jessie supported her well and they learned more than the younger ones. Jessie had had a new light thrown on the subject, and worked with a steadiness that surprised Amy for all the year that George Copeland was absent. Indeed up to a certain point her success was greater than Allan's; her work was less faulty, though less brilliant and less ambitious. It certainly satisfied George Copeland, and the letters she wrote to his father and mother first on the engagement between them being ratified by her parents' consent, and afterwards at Gundabook, were so well written and so admirably expressed, that no one could have supposed that they came from a girl whose childhood and youth had been spent in the far bush, and her whole life in constant unintellectual labour. George's mother got her letters by heart; she wrote the most affectionate answers to the beloved daughter-in-law, who had won back her son to hope and self-respect, and every month both