"How can you say so, dear aunt?" interrupted Julia, with a little impatience, "when I tell you that Anna herself—my Anna, told me with her own lips, here in this very house, that Mrs. Welton was entirely to blame, and that she had never done any thing in her life to justify the treatment or the remark—now Anna told me this with her own mouth."
As Julia spoke, the ardour of her feelings brought the colour to her cheeks and an animation to her eyes that rendered her doubly handsome; and Charles Weston, who had watched her varying countenance with delight, sighed as she concluded, and rising, left the room.
"I understand that your father intends spending his winter in Carolina, for his health," said Miss Emmerson to Katherine.
"Yes," returned the other in a low tone, and bending over her work to conceal her feelings; "mother has persuaded him to avoid our winter."
"And you are to be left behind?"
"I am afraid so," was the modest reply.
"And your brother and sister go to Washington together?"
"That is the arrangement, I believe."
Miss Emmerson said no more, but she turned an expressive look on her ward, which Julia was too much occupied with her thoughts to notice. The illness of her father, and the prospect of a long separation from her sister, were too much for the fortitude of Katherine at any time, and hastily gathering her work in her hand, she left the room just in time to prevent the tears which streamed down her cheeks from meeting the eyes of her companions.
"We ought to ask Katherine to make one of our family, in the absence of her mother and sister," said Miss Emmerson, as soon as the door was closed.