Her boys, too, so eager was she to see Helen, were not yet equipped in their new suits, and were anomalous spectacles in Highland kilts and sailor hats.
Clara and Carrie did not condescend to appear on this occasion, they saw amply sufficient of Mrs. Home and family over the dining-room blind.
Helen felt a sense of burning humiliation and shame to think that now, when she was at home among her own people, they would not even take the trouble to come upstairs and thank Mrs. Home for her great kindness to her, nor even so much as send her a cup of tea. She hoped in her heart that her friend would think they were out! But they went audibly up and down stairs and laughed and shut doors, and Mrs. Home was neither deaf nor stupid.
She stayed an hour, and Helen enjoyed her visit greatly (despite her disappointment at the non-appearance of her relations or, failing them, the tea-tray). It was one little oasis in the desert of her now dreary life; they conversed eagerly together and talked the shibboleth of people who have the same friends, in the same country; they kissed and cried a little, and parted with mutual promises of many letters, for Mrs. Home was going to Jersey, and thence to the Continent.
"Your friends are not our friends, and our friends are not your friends," said Carrie forcibly, and Helen felt that indeed, as far as appearance went, her visitors had not been a success, and for her own part never dreamt of being admitted within the sacred circle of her cousins' acquaintance.
Now and then she met people accidentally in the hall, or in the street when walking with her cousins; and once she overheard Carrie saying to Clara, apropos of visitors,—
"Of course there is no occasion to introduce Helen to any one," and this amiable injunction was obeyed to the letter. However, the omission sat very lightly on the once admired of all admirers at Port Blair.
One morning it happened that Helen was in the drawing-room when a bosom friend of Carrie's came to call—a Miss Fowler Sharpe, a fashionable acquaintance whom the Misses Platt toadied, for she had the entrée to circles barred to them, and they hoped to use her as a pass key.
They made a great deal of the lady, flattered her, caressed her, and ran after her, all of which was agreeable to Miss Sharpe. She was a very elegantly dressed London girl, who spoke with a drawl, and gave one the idea that her eyelids were too heavy for her eyes. She had come over to Cream Street to make some arrangements about an opera-box, and to have a little genteel gossip.
Helen was busily engaged in sewing Madras muslin and coloured bows on the backs of some of the chairs, where she was "discovered" by her cousins and their friend, to whom she was presented in a hasty, off-hand manner, which plainly said, "You need not notice her!"