“Don’t let him sit in a draught, and please send him to bed at ten, and don’t keep him longer than you want. It is awfully kind of you to ask him at all. You have made him quite happy.”
“I shall remember all your orders,” Ambleton said, meekly.
He thought he had never seen anything sweeter or more desirable than Polly looked on this morning as she stood in the big doorway and waved her hand in farewell to her brother.
“Now, Polly will go upstairs and have a good cry,” Harold informed him. “Polly always cries when anybody goes away. She says she can’t help herself.”
Polly did exactly as her brother foretold.
As soon as the door was closed she ran up to her little room and indulged in a fit of weeping. She could not have explained why exactly, but the feeling pressed on her that this visit Harold was about to make would bring her some new sorrow, even while it promised so much that was bright and pleasant. Valentine had enlarged his invitation.
“My sister will write to you in her own name; but I, on her behalf, now beg that both Miss Pennington and yourself will come down and stay with us also,” he had said to Polly’s mother. “We shall only wait till we are quite settled before expecting you. It is not very gay at Dynechester, but the place is so quaint I am sure it will interest you.”
Polly had answered for her mother.
“We shall be very glad to come,” she had said, briskly; “and we will go,” she further informed her mother when Harold had departed, and they were alone. “It will do us both good. I don’t know how you feel, mother, but I need a little change of air.”
Mrs. Pennington did not answer immediately. When she did speak she had a strained note in her voice.