“No,” Mrs. Cromwell returned decidedly. “I’m certain it isn’t that. She’s sensible about the boys she knows, and she’s never shown the slightest sentimentality. I’ve thought over all those things, and it isn’t any of them. Nothing’s the matter with her health either; so there just isn’t any reason at all for a change in her. Yet she has changed—completely. In the space of a few weeks—you might almost say a few days—instead of being the bright, romping, responsive girl she’s always been, she’s become so silent and remote you’d think the rest of her family were mere distant and rather inferior acquaintances. It’s mysterious and extremely uncomfortable. Your father thinks we ought to send her away to school where she’d have a complete change, and I’ve had some correspondence about it with Miss Remy of your old school. I think perhaps——”
Mrs. Cromwell stopped speaking, her attention arrested by the sound of a door opening and closing. She listened for a moment, then whispered: “There! She’s just come in. See for yourself.”
The two ladies were sitting in a room that opened upon the broad central hallway of the house, and their view of that part of the black-and-white marble-floored hall just beyond the open double doors was unimpeded. Here appeared in profile the subject of their discussion, a plump brunette demoiselle, rosy-cheeked and far from uncomely, but weightily preoccupied with her own thoughts.
She did not even glance into the room where sat her mother and sister, though the doorway was so wide that she must have been conscious of them;—she was going toward the stairway at the other end of the hall, and would have passed without offering any greeting, if her mother’s voice, a little strained, had not checked her.
“Cornelia!”
The girl paused unwillingly. “Yes?”
“Don’t you see who’s here?”
“Yes.” Cornelia nodded vaguely in the direction of her sister. “How do you do,” she said, not smiling. “I’m glad to see you.”
“Is that all you have to say?” Mrs. Cromwell inquired.
“Yes, Mamma, if you please. May I go now? There’s something important I want to attend to.”