“Just what I do not want you to see. They have found out that the Rectory is unhealthy, and stuck up a new bald house on the top of the hill; and the Hall is new furnished in colours that set one’s teeth on edge. Nothing is like itself but Harry, and he only when you get him off duty—without his wife! I was glad to get away to Belfast.”
“And there, judging from Julia’s letter, they must have nearly devoured you.”
“They were very hospitable. Your sister is not so very unlike you, Ermine?”
“Oh, Colin!” exclaimed Alison, with an indignation of which she became ashamed, and added, by way of making it better, “Perhaps not so very.”
“She was very gracious to me,” said Colin, smiling, “and we had much pleasant talk of you.”
“Yes,” said Ermine, “it will be a great pleasure to poor Julia to be allowed to take us up again, and you thought the doctor sufficiently convinced.”
“More satisfactorily so than Harry, for he reasoned out the matter, and seems to me to have gone more by his impression that a man could not be so imprudent as Edward in good faith than by Maddox’s representation.”
“That is true,” said Alison, “he held out till Edward refused to come home, and then nothing would make him listen to a word on his behalf.”
“And it will be so again,” thought Ermine, with a throb at her heart. Then she asked, “Did you see whether there was a letter for you at home?”
“Yes, I looked in, and found only this, which I have only glanced at, from Bessie.”