On the wings of fate

by Effie Adelaide Rowlands

Polly saw now that if he had acted with a minimum of tact, he had been actuated by the strongest feelings of consideration for the welfare of a woman, who, after all, had been a complete stranger to him.

For the rest there was something that was attractive to Polly in this man’s appearance. It was not that she considered him even fairly good-looking, but she could not be insensible to his frank, pleasant manner, and to the undoubted sympathy which had pervaded him in this, their second and more agreeable meeting. Maybe, too, the fact that Hubert Kestridge had testified so warmly to the many good qualities that were crammed into Valentine Ambleton’s nature had the greatest power of all in putting the man before her in a good light.

“Mother will be surprised to hear that I have met Mr. Ambleton,” Polly said to herself, as she jolted home to Kensington in another omnibus. “I rather hope he will come and see her. I feel somehow she might enjoy his coming. My poor, little mother!” Polly added, with a sigh.

Her sympathy and pity for her mother were illimitable, and she was quite ignorant that, on her side, Mrs. Pennington gave her unreasonable sympathy and pity in return.

Things had been so sad, and so full of anxiety these last few weeks, that Polly had not had time to sit down and realize the blow that had fallen on her young heart. She was only conscious, in a dumb sort of way, of a curious pain that seemed to lie heavily always in one spot, and she knew she shrank sharply from even the remembrance of Winnie or of the man who was now Winnie’s husband.

As to how Hubert Kestridge had fallen into this position of being Winifred Pennington’s husband few people, and Polly last of all, could have offered a thorough explanation. In truth, one person alone could have afforded this explanation, and that person was Winnie herself.

The game she had played had been a very clever, and yet a very simple, one. It is a game that has been played scores of times in the world’s history, and may very easily be played many hundreds or scores again, at least so long as there exist women of the caliber of Winifred Pennington. Given two natures so honest, so proud and yet so open to influence as Kestridge’s and Polly’s, it will be seen at a glance that Winifred’s task of alienating them even before they had thoroughly realized what lay in their hearts, and substituting herself in the guise of the necessary sympathy, was not a phenomenally difficult one. Worked by her sister’s slender, iron, little hands, Polly was transformed into a sharp-tongued, bad-tempered creature, in whose eyes Hubert could do nothing but wrong. The few weeks he spent in town were made miserable to him by Polly’s apparently undisguised contempt and dislike for him, and if it had not been for Winnie he would have left his self-selected task of looking after Mrs. Pennington’s affairs, and gone back to Ireland in a violent rage. It was not, however, possible for him to leave, while Winnie made such constant demands on his sympathy.

“Oh! don’t go, Hubert,” she used to plead, eagerly, her eyes, filled with tears, upraised to him. “You are such a comfort. I don’t know what mother and I shall do when you go back to Ireland.”

“It seems to me I don’t do much, according to Polly’s ideas,” Hubert had said, gloomily, on more than one occasion, “I know I am not much account, but still—I came to see if Aunt Phœbe, and——”

Winnie was always ready with some pretty, soothing word. She was always sweet and gentle with him; always so pretty to look at, that her influence stole imperceptibly over the man’s troubled heart, and one evening it came to pass that he was holding Winnie’s neat little figure in his arms, and was kissing away her tears, and promising her all the happiness and sunshine she longed for so ardently, poor child! It had been a repeated story of the misery of life under the same roof with Polly that, ending in a flood of passionate tears, had driven Winifred, like a child, to Hubert for comfort, and in less than sixty seconds the words were spoken, the link tied, and Polly was lost to him forever! The marriage had followed swiftly on this. Again it had been Winnie’s work.