Amethyst stood perplexed. Some men started up from the tables and began to explain, evidently with the best intentions, but with such vehemence of tone and gesture that Miss Haredale clutched her niece’s arm, with a terrified conviction that they were all making excuses to stare at Amethyst, who began to make her inquiries in French—when, behind her, a voice that might have been the echo of her own said “Aunt Annabel!”
She turned, and by one of the little tables stood a tall woman, with a slight swaying figure like Una’s, a dress incongruously splendid in that squalid place, and a face—the face of one of themselves—not so much older as to have lost all its kindred beauty, but with pale cheeks and painted eyes, and a look at once familiar, as only the nearest of kin can be, and strange, as of one belonging to another kind of world.
“Blanche!” exclaimed Miss Haredale, “Blanche! can it be you?”
“Oh yes, Aunt Annabel. It is. I am staying here for a little variety, and I saw papa, and Charles—both of them—in the rooms. And I thought I’d better come and look after my brother, when I heard he was ill.”
She laughed a little, as she uttered these words in something of Tory’s tone when she did the good little girl, an effect heightened by the use of the old-fashioned appellation by which, long, long ago, Lord Haredale’s elder children had been wont to call him; but her eyes were on her sister. “Is that Amethyst?” she said. “Ah, you don’t remember me.”
“Yes, Blanche, I do,” said Amethyst; but she had turned deadly pale, for Blanche had been little more than an abstraction to her mind.
“But where is your father?” said Miss Haredale. “And Charles, is he any better?”
“Oh no—nor can be. He’s got D.T. and all sorts of other horrors. Just drank himself to death, poor fellow. I can pay the nurse and the doctor: but I can’t bear the sight of him. What was the good of your coming?”
“Is the nurse trained, my dear? Indeed, I ought to go up,” said Miss Haredale.
“Well, I can show you. Perhaps he is asleep. Trained—oh dear no; she’s a horrid old woman.”