“I wanted you to send her away long ago, dear,” Christina said, quietly; “and if she has been rude to you to-day, I think she ought to go at once.”
Mrs. Pennington colored painfully.
“I will give her proper notice next week,” was her answer. She moved the papers nervously on her desk; there was something most pathetic in the look of her small, thin fingers. “Are you going out, my darling?” she asked, looking up hurriedly.
“I came to know if you would come with me, mother? I heard from Sunstead this morning. Mark wants me to go to his grandmother for Christmas, and I must get at least two new frocks—one for evening, and the other for everyday wear.”
“Shall you go to Celeste as usual?” Mrs. Pennington asked. She made a big endeavor to speak lightly, but any person of keen perception would have read the heaviness, the perplexity that lay in her voice.
Christina paused.
“I think so. She cuts so well, and she is not more expensive than anyone else. Grannie’s check came to me this morning, happily, and it will just see me comfortably through this visit. I am sorry to leave you, mother, dear, but I suppose I must go, must I not?”
When Christina put a little pleading into her sweetly toned voice she was quite irresistible, to her mother at least.
“Oh, my dear, of course you must go. It is only right and proper that you should be at Sunstead as often as possible, since it is to be your future home. We—we shall miss you, that you know only too well,” Mrs. Pennington said, with a faint smile breaking the troubled look on her face, “but we must not be selfish.”
Christina kissed her mother in a pathetic little way.