Grace echoed the laugh.
“I never knew how much I loved dear old Dynechester till I saw it again yesterday, Val.”
Valentine glanced affectionately at his sister.
They were an undemonstrative pair, but few people had a deeper, truer love for one another than Val and Grace Ambleton. The girl’s love had other elements in it besides mere sisterly affection and pride. Valentine had been the only parent Grace had known.
It was true she had a shadowy memory of her mother, a woman who had been in constant suffering, and who had leaned upon her eldest boy for protection, but this mother had passed away before Grace had reached five years of age, and such care and thought as the girl had had in the succeeding years she had had from her brother, Valentine.
She was dear to Sacha too, and she loved her second brother devotedly, but Sacha, though her senior by three years, had always fallen into the position of being her baby and care, just as she had been Val’s.
Their mother had been a Wentworth, the only daughter of the old lady who lived a perpetual invalid up at the large house beyond the outskirts of the town.
There had been three sons born to this Lady Wentworth, and of these three two had died in childhood and one had married and had begotten an heir to the title and the estates.
Grace had a very vivid memory of her Uncle Ambrose, father of the present baronet, Sir Mark Wentworth.
She had been very much attached to this uncle, and she had sorrowed deeply at his sudden death. It had surprised no one to learn at the time of that death, that by the will of Sir Ambrose, his nephew, Valentine Ambleton, was appointed a co-trustee with an old legal friend, to Mark Wentworth and his various properties.