“Will she?” queried Winifred, as she had risen to go down to her practicing. “If Chrissie ever has a farthing she can call her own, she will keep it for herself, you see if she doesn’t.”
Polly had retorted with some hot word of reproach and loyalty mingled, and then she had gone down to her task of cutting the dead leaves and watering the plants, and she had quickly dismissed Winifred’s words as being only a part of that jealousy toward Chrissie that was made a little more patent to Polly each day.
But Winifred’s curt, sharp definition of her elder sister came back to poor little Polly in this moment of startled pain and self-communion; a veil seemed to slip from her eyes, and she saw Chrissie as she had never seen her before. Her indignation against the man who had brought such a sudden change in the atmosphere of her home would have been very deep had she not had ringing in her ears those few last words he had spoken, that sentence fraught with a pity too deep to be expressed.
The entrance of Winifred, her usually calm manner quite moved and excited, called Polly back from her thoughts.
“We are to go down to luncheon by ourselves,” Winnie said. “Mother is ill, and Chrissie has gone out, and Jane says some one came, and there has been some sort of a scene. I want to know all about it.”
Polly brushed her hair savagely.
“I am so hungry I could eat a bear!” she said, and so saying she pushed past Winifred and ran out of the room. Not from her lips should anyone hear aught that was hurtful to one who had been so dear to her, and was still so dear. That was the keynote of Polly’s nature—love and loyalty; a clinging faith which not even proof could well upset.
Valentine Ambleton drove directly to a railway station on leaving the Penningtons’ house. His sister was waiting for him; she was very like him—tall, handsome, frank-looking. She wore a well-cut traveling gown, and had two dogs beside her, carefully held by a strap.
“You are a little late, dear,” she said, but she smiled as she said it.