The newcomer picked her way across the floor with daintily uplifted skirts, and subsided into a deck chair of stretched canvas.
“I will not rob you of your coffee, most dutiful of sisters!” she exclaimed. “I have had adventures—oh, more than one, I can assure you. It has been a marvellous day—and I am going to England.”
Anna looked at her sister gravely. Even in her painting smock and with her disarranged hair, the likeness between the two girls was marvellous.
“The adventures I do not doubt, Annabel,” she said. “They seem to come to you as naturally as disappointment—to other people. But to England! What has happened, then?”
Already the terror of a few hours ago seemed to have passed away from the girl who leaned back so lazily in her chair, watching the tip of her patent shoe swing backwards and forwards. She could even think of what had happened. Very soon she would be able to forget it.
“Happened! Oh, many things,” she declared indolently. “The most important is that I have a new admirer.”
The wonderful likeness between the two girls was never less noticeable than at that moment. Anna stood looking down upon her sister with grave perturbed face. Annabel lounged in her chair with a sort of insolent abandon in her pose, and wide-open eyes which never flinched or drooped. One realized indeed then where the differences lay; the tender curves about Anna’s mouth transformed into hard sharp lines in Annabel’s, the eyes of one, truthful and frank, the other’s more beautiful but with less expression—windows lit with dazzling light, but through which one saw—nothing.
“A new admirer, Annabel? But what has that to do with your going to England?”
“Everything! He is Sir John Ferringhall—very stupid, very respectable, very egotistical. But, after all, what does that matter? He is very much taken with me. He tries hard to conceal it, but he cannot.”
“Then why,” Anna asked quietly, “do you run away? It is not like you.”