‘As I have been telling him all this morning,’ said Lucy.
‘How is she?’ whispered the boy, rousing himself to look imploringly in Winifred’s face.
‘Your father seems satisfied about her.’
At that moment a door at some distance was opened, and Gilbert seemed to thrill all over as for the moment ere it closed a baby’s cry was heard. He turned his face away, and rested it on the window. ‘My brother! my brother!’ he murmured, but at that moment his father turned the corner of the passage, saying that Albinia had heard their arrival, and was very eager to see her sister.
Still Winifred could not leave the boy without saying, ‘You can make Gilbert happy about her, can you not? He is waiting here, watching anxiously for news of her.’
‘Gilbert himself best knows whether he has a right to be made happy,’ said Mr. Kendal, gravely. ‘I promised to ask no questions till she is able to explain, but I much fear that he has been causing her great grief and distress.’
He fixed his eyes on his son, and Winifred, in the belief that she was better out of their way, hurried to Albinia’s room, and was seen very little all the rest of the day.
She was spared, however, to walk to church the next morning with her husband, Lucy showing them the way, and being quiet and agreeable when repressed by Mr. Ferrars’s presence. After church, Mr. Dusautoy overtook them to inquire after Mrs. Kendal, and to make a kind proposal of exchanging Sunday duty. He undertook to drive the ponies home on the morrow, begged for credentials for the clerk, and messages for Willie and Mary, and seemed highly pleased with the prospect of the holiday, as he called it, only entreating that Mrs. Ferrars would be so kind as to look in on ‘Fanny,’ if Mrs. Kendal could spare her.
‘I thought,’ said Winifred to her husband, ‘that you would rather have exchanged a Sunday when Albinia is better able to enjoy you?’
‘That may yet be, but poor Kendal is so much depressed, that I do not like to leave him.’