Away across the room, in her little white-hung bed, Winifred gave a tiny sigh of content.
“Only a little while longer,” she said to herself, as she drifted into sleep, “and I shall have a home of my own, and be taken out of the horrid things here. Polly is certainly a little fool; but if she will cut off her nose to spite her face she has nobody to blame but herself!”
CHAPTER VI.
THE YOUNG LADY WENTWORTH.
Christmas with the Ambletons was usually made the time for a small but cheery family gathering, and for this particular Christmas following her sojourn abroad Grace had planned out many little extra pleasures for her brothers and herself.
Sacha would come down from London, and the various spare bedrooms in the Dower House would have their complement of relations and old friends.
The time between her return and the advent of Christmas had passed very quickly with Grace. She had any amount of old threads to retie, old habits and duties to resume, and the days had gone happily enough.
The news of Sir Mark’s marriage had been the only cloud on the horizon of her busy life, and the knowledge that the angry feeling between Mark Wentworth and Valentine had deepened into a definite quarrel, was a real trouble to Grace.
The two men, who had been appointed by the late Sir Ambrose to act as trustees to his son’s estates, had neither of them received any intimation of Mark’s marriage. They, like all the world, read the information in the newspapers, and Val’s annoyance and regret was shared to the full by the elder trustee.
“I shall never set foot in Sunstead again,” Mr. Baker declared, wrathfully, to Val, and Val smiled grimly.
“I expect I shall never be given the chance,” was what he said to himself.