Hazel rose from her place with no appearance of haste, and went slowly in search of the missing one.
Mrs. Tregaskis remarked rather elaborately:
“Miss Blandflower is a very old friend of ours, though she is a great deal younger than I am. She will give you your lessons, I hope, with Hazel.”
“Is she Hazel’s governess?” inquired Frances gently.
Frederick Tregaskis nodded, but his wife said with an air of slight repression: “She lives with us, Frances dear, as I told you, and we do our very best to make her feel that this is her home. You see, Miss Blandflower is extremely poor, and has nowhere else to live.”
“Like us,” returned Frances with mournful matter-of-factness.
“Not at all like you,” said her cousin Frederick, suddenly looking at her. “Neither you nor Rosamund need think that you have nowhere to go. You will have money of your father’s some day, in fact it belongs to you now, and will be used for your education and any other expenses. You can go to school, if you would like that, or live with anybody——”
“Come, come, Frederick, we needn’t go into these sordid details,” said Bertha, with an extremely annoyed laugh.
Frances looked bewildered, as though she felt herself to have received a rebuke, but Rosamund’s grey eyes met those of Frederick Tregaskis with a sudden lightening of their sombre gloom.
“I disagree with you, Bertha,” he observed, with a look of dislike at his wife. “These things are much better clearly defined. It is quite conceivable that Rosamund and Frances may dislike the position of refugees under our hospitable roof, and in that case they may as well know that I shall further any reasonable scheme they may entertain for existence elsewhere.”