This speech made her suddenly very angry.
“Come along, Winnie! Little girls have no right to be out of their little beds at such a late hour as nine o’clock.”
She blew a kiss to her mother.
“Good-night, precious love,” she said; “good-night,” she added curtly to Hubert, giving him a darkened glance out of her wonderful eyes, as she marched out of the room.
“I used to think I liked Hubert Kestridge! How could I have been such an idiot, I wonder?” she said to herself, savagely, as she went upstairs. “And I do wish Winnie would not put on that dolly manner now! We aren’t very old, I suppose; but we’ve got to be old enough to help our mother to fight all the troubles in front of her.”
She was a long time going to bed, although the room was very cold, for fires had been stopped by her own commands, when economy, in its most rigid form, walked into the house.
Tired as she had been and was, there was a restlessness and a funny sort of pain in Polly’s heart to-night that she was not able to subdue or understand.
It had hurt her vaguely to leave the man below in so ungracious a fashion; but yet she had to do it. She hated the thought of pity even from him, and Polly knew to-night that she would have taken more from Hubert Kestridge than she would have taken from any other living creature.
She saw him with old and new eyes to-night. She was very glad to see him, and yet she shrank from him, too.
Her hitherto untried womanly instinct seemed to tell her that in the man’s heart there was a sentiment as deep as her own; but while she guessed this she tried to shut the knowledge from her.