She held out both her capable hands.
Frances looked at her quite silently with streaming eyes.
“Oh,” cried Lady Argent pitifully, and Frances turned to her at once and hid her face against the outstretched arm.
“Poor little thing,” said Lady Argent almost tearfully. But Ludovic noted that his mother seemed to comfort Frances in an instinctive sort of way, with gentle hand stroking her hair, and without attempting to make her speak.
Bertha Tregaskis, “wonderful with children,” Ludovic ironically reflected, was capable of nothing more startling than an imperative:
“Hush, now, Rosamund. She’ll stop in a minute. Go on with your breakfast, and remember that you have a long journey in front of you. However, you’ll have a real Cornish tea when you arrive—splits and cream, and pasties, and all sorts of things. Us has a real proper ole set-tü, at tay-time.” She laughed, and for the rest of the meal was very jovial and talkative, drawing attention from Frances, who presently stopped crying and wiped her eyes in a shamefaced way. She looked timidly once or twice at Rosamund, which glances were intercepted by Mrs. Tregaskis with significantly raised eyebrows which said plainly to Lady Argent, “What did I tell you?”
But it was Ludovic who saw the elder sister’s answering look and read into it her intense agony of protective love and impotent apprehension. The dead mother might have made Frances’ world, but Frances made Rosamund’s.
III
“HERE we are!” declared Mrs. Tregaskis thankfully, as the train slowed down at Porthlew. “I declare it’s good to be alive, in such weather and a country like this one.”
She descended lightly on to the astonishingly bleak little platform, empty and swept by a north wind.