Chapter Eighteen.
Seaside Anticipations.
Meanwhile Nesta was very full of her own interests. Things were going in what might be considered a middling way at the Aldworths’. Mrs Aldworth was no worse, but she was not much better. She was suffering greatly from the heat, and yet she was not strong enough to be moved. Nurse Davenant still remained, and kept the invalid in comfort, and saw that she got the necessary food, and was not worried or neglected. Molly and Ethel were busy over their own concerns; they were forced to devote so much time, and Nesta was also required to be on duty for a certain time each day. The fright the girls had sustained when their mother was so seriously ill had not yet passed from their minds. Its memory still had power to move them. They were still alarmed when they thought of it.
But Nesta was less full of fear than her sisters, although her grief and terror had been greater at the time. Hers was the most elastic nature, perhaps in some ways the most unfaithful. She was now feverishly anxious to get away to Scarborough. She had ventured, on the morning after she had received her beloved yellow-boy, to sound Ethel on the subject of that visit.
“Do you think they’d let me go?” she said.
“Who are ‘they’?” asked Ethel.
“Oh, you know—father, and Marcia—old Marcia, and Horace.”
“If you ask me for my opinion,” said Ethel, “I should once and for all advise you to put it right out of your head. You haven’t the most remote chance of going away. You are required at home.”