They knew Winifred had made herself Hubert Kestridge’s wife purely and simply because she had no intention of facing the poverty and struggle that life in the old home must have been to her. She cared about as much for the man she had married as she cared for an old, discarded glove, and herein lay the sharpest sting for Polly, for though Hubert Kestridge was now passed out of her life, and ought not even to have a place in her thoughts, such was her nature that the knowledge of what lay before him in his marriage could not fail but grieve her.
Nevertheless, she was so brave, so cheerful and so ready to take on her shoulders the whole burden of her mother’s cares, that she acted on that mother in the most beneficial way possible, and the two became in these days not merely a loving parent and child, but two devoted friends and comrades eager to fight side by side.
They avoided, by common consent, all discussion of either Christina or Winifred, neither of whom had done anything to show their mother love and thought in her widowhood.
The Kestridges, of course, were abroad, but Lady Wentworth was within a couple of hours of town, and Polly had expected that her eldest sister would surely have left the grandeur of her new home to appear for a few hours at least in the sorrowful atmosphere of the old one when the news of her father’s death had been sent her. But Christina was thorough in all she did, and she evinced no desire whatever to hurry to her mother’s side.
She wrote a few constrained words to her mother, and to Polly she sent a curt epistle, announcing that as she supposed ready money would be necessary she would be prepared to send a check for fifty pounds when it was needed.
To this Polly sent back a reply.
“When you are asked to send money,” she had written, “you may rest assured it will be accepted. In the meanwhile, let me advise you to spend this fifty pounds in buying yourself a fine, black gown to mark the heaviness of your grief, and the respect which has been such a prominent feature of your attitude toward your father and mother.
“Yours,
“Mary Pennington.”
She had written and posted this in a fit of temper that was not to be measured, and she had not repented of so doing when the temper was gone, though she felt she had cut off any possibility of a reconciliation with Christina by this act. She said nothing to her mother about it.
“She would only fret more than she does now,” was what she said to herself.