'You see,' said the boy, 'after the little girls were born, my mother had no time for Ave, and sent her to Brighton, and there she begged to stay on one half after another, learning all sorts of things; but only coming home for short holidays, like company, for us to wonder at her and show her about, thinking herself ever so much in advance of my poor mother, and now she knows just nothing at all of her!'
'You cannot tell, Leonard, and I am sure she has been devoted to you.'
'If she had stayed at home like you, she might have known how to let one alone. Oh, you can't think what peace it was yesterday!'
'Was it peace? I feared it was desertion.'
'It is much better to be by oneself, than always worried. To have them always at me to get up my spirits when the house is miserable—'
'Ah,' said Ethel, 'I remember your mother rejoicing that she had not to send you from home, and saying you were always so kind and gentle to her.'
'Did she!' cried the boy, eagerly. 'Oh, but she forgot—' and he hid his face, the features working with anguish.
'So pleased and proud she used to look, walking with you on Saturday afternoons.'
'Those Saturdays! They were the only walks she ever would take; but she would always come with me.'
More followed in the same strain, and Ethel began to gather more distinct impressions of the Ward family. She saw that her present charge was warm and sound-hearted, and that the strength of his affections had been chiefly absorbed by the homely housewifely mother, comparatively little esteemed by the modernized brother and sister. Of the loss of his father he seemed to think less; it seemed, indeed, rather to reconcile him to that of his mother, by the grief it spared her; and it confirmed Ethel's notion, that Mr. Ward, a busy and dull man, paid no great attention to his children between the plaything period and that of full development. The mother was the home; and Averil, though Leonard showed both love for and pride in her, had hitherto been a poor substitute, while as to Henry, there was something in each mention of him which gave Ethel an undefined dread of the future of the young household, and a doubt of the result of her father's kind schemes of patronage.