“She won’t give in—she has such a spirit—but I know she is more injured than we suspect, and that Dr. Harwood has rather a grave opinion of her case. An accident to the spine is always a serious matter.”
“I should think it was,” I assented. “But then, she has youth on her side, which is something.”
“And she will have you by her side, which will be something,” he replied. “It seems almost providential—quite providential, indeed—that I should have been able to lay claim to a relation, to a young companion for her, just at this critical time.”
“Most providential for me, uncle, seeing that I have neither friends nor home.”
“And here is your home now, my dear,” he said, as we dashed between a pair of great stone pillars. “This is Chalgrove, where your mother was born. There were only two of us, and we were always greatly attached to one another—and she was the leading spirit of the two, afraid of nothing not even of my father; and many a scrape we got into together, though I was the elder by five years.”
Chalgrove Chase was a lovely place—not a new place in old clothes, nor an old place decked out in modern garments; but a beautiful, dignified, venerable pile, standing among sloping green glades and fine forest trees. We entered through a hall or armory lined with coats of mail and feudal banners, and passed into a great gallery paneled with carved oak, and hung with impressive-looking portraits; everything around me spoke of generations of magnificence, and of dignified prosperity. And I was, in a way, a daughter of this wealthy and ancient house!
The real daughter of the house received me with wide-open arms, as she lay upon a couch in her boudoir. Poor girl! even now I saw a sad change in her; her merry, dancing eyes looked anxious, and almost tragic; were they already deploring her blighted youth? Her lips were drawn with pain, her cheeks had lost their pretty contour. Yes, in ten days’ time Dolly Chalgrove was wasted to a shadow!
Her spirits, however, were still in robust condition, and she hailed me with enthusiasm, and—what is more lasting—with warm and enduring affection.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t care for many girls!” she confessed as I sat beside her, “and those who have been my chief pals have a horrid knack of getting married, and that puts an end to everything; because, once a girl marries, she tells all she hears to her husband, and even lets him read her letters, and that three-cornered sort of business is most unsatisfactory. But now I have you, my own first cousin, who is the image of my Aunt Gwendoline, father says, and as I resemble her too, no wonder we are almost like sisters, and that I was drawn to you on the spot!”