And after this she sat and watched her mother’s white, thin fingers as they threaded a needle and stitched away industriously, and while she watched she dreamed the only dream dear to her young heart now—the dream of giving this loved being all those things that her devotion determined were the proper accompaniment of life for such a mother as she possessed.
CHAPTER X.
A WILFUL WOMAN.
Valentine did not lose any time in writing to his cousin to broach the subject of his grandmother.
He made absolutely no reference to the dismissal from the Dower House. He wrote tersely, and put Grace’s wish into as few words as possible, and he directed the letter, as usual, to Mark at Sunstead.
He was busy starting all the arrangements for their move—he had not lost an hour in obtaining the house he had desired to have—when an answer was brought to his letter.
It was an answer written in a bold, feminine hand, and Valentine’s brows met fiercely as he saw this.
Christina wrote curtly, informing him that in her husband’s absence she had opened the letter, and she begged to inform him that she must unhesitatingly refuse, in her husband’s name, his suggestion of moving old Lady Wentworth from her present quarters.
“Your grandmother is far too weak to undertake any exertion, and the mere idea of removing her from a place in which she has lived so long, savors, to me at least, of cruelty. I fail to understand why Miss Ambleton cannot visit her grandmother at Sunstead as formerly. Pray let it be understood that I make no protest to her doing this; in fact, I consider it to be a neglect of a positive duty on her part if she continues to abstain from coming in the future.”
Valentine threw down the letter with a laugh so strange that Grace, who happened to be passing through the hall, wearing a pale and half-bewildered air—the uprooting of her home goods was a terrible business to her, poor girl!—looked at him startled.
“What is it, Valentine?” she asked, quickly.