Were he and Valentine to have been much thrown together, they must inevitably have come to loggerheads, but the brothers seldom met.
There was a considerable amount of good in Sacha Ambleton, but there were also several qualities in his nature which he never desired to bring to his brother’s knowledge.
Mark Wentworth had swiftly found out those qualities, and Val would have been bitterly surprised could he have known that Sacha, if he had not actually assisted and associated with his cousin in his foolish, dissipated life, had certainly never considered he had the moral right to censure these follies.
Had the matter ever been threshed out between Valentine and himself, Sacha’s views of the situation would have been summed up most probably in the remark given, good-humoredly, that he was a man of the world, and did not see that Mark was doing anything very much out of the common, but, unfortunately, perhaps, things had never got so far between Valentine and himself.
Sacha had heard, of course, from both his brother and sister of the rupture between themselves and his cousin, and he had written most sympathetically to Grace on the subject. He had not thought it necessary to tell Grace that he had had Mark’s version of the matter also, and he certainly had no intention whatever of letting Grace know that his real sympathy went with Mark Wentworth, and not with Valentine.
“Hang it all!” he had said to himself, “Mark is not a child, and he has every right to take a wife if he chooses to do so. Val has overstepped his limits this time. He ought to remember that Mark is his own master, and it was a decidedly unnecessary act to go and set the girl against the marriage. I think Val deserves all the snubbing he may get. But if all I hear is true, I fancy the new Lady Wentworth must be a woman of spirit, and will not accept Val’s interference very meekly.”
A theory that was amply proved to Sacha when the news came of Christina’s attitude toward his brother and sister, more especially when he heard of the eviction from the Dower House.
“Val has met his master for once,” he said to himself, with a faint smile. Since he would suffer no discomfort himself by this change of houses, he was rather amused than otherwise at the first working of Christina’s power, though the moment he met Grace and saw how really troubled the girl was, Sacha was truly moved to pity.
He was honestly fond of Grace, and he never remembered to have seen her so ill and sorrowful as she was now.
It was certainly hard, too, that Grace should suffer for Val’s doings.