“I can’t. I asked him once or twice, and he said I wasn’t to plague him.”
“But it seems so queer, because he began by liking her.”
“Well, I can’t satisfy your curiosity, girls, for I don’t know myself. All I can say is that she did something which turned him against her that time when she was here in the summer. Oh there isn’t a hope of his asking her back, not any hope; and, my dear girls, I trust you will make it clear to him how you spent such a frightful lot of money; you seem to have been very extravagant. As he said to me, ‘My purse would not be the long one it is if my wife had been like my girls are now.’ You mustn’t do it, children. Your father will ask you to account for every farthing before he pays Miss Weston’s bill, and I thought I had better prepare you for it.”
Grace felt herself turn a little pale. Anne looked at her sister and did not utter a word. The two girls had reason for their troubled looks; even home, even the beloved home, was not all that it should be just on account of Kitty. Why should Kitty’s evil influence follow these two poor girls everywhere?
When they were undressing in their lovely room that evening, they sent their maid away.
Grace jumped on the bed, and, stretching her long legs and folding her arms on the brass rail at the foot of the bed, looked straight at Anne. “Now,” she said, “however are we to manage about Miss Weston’s bill?”
“I haven’t an idea,” said Anne.
“It is something frightful,” continued Grace, “from what mother tells me, father is going to talk it all over with us. Miss Weston must be paid; and, more than that, the things that are ordered in our names belong to Kitty. How are we to get over the matter?”
“Has the bill come yet?” inquired Grace.
“Yes, Grace, that is the worst of it. Miss Weston, it seems from mother’s account, has sent in the bill she has sent for years—‘To account rendered,’ &c.—but father was very angry at the total being so large, and told mother to write and ask for items. That bill hasn’t come yet, but, of course, it will almost immediately. Of course, Miss Weston has no suspicions—why should she?—and she’ll just enter every item. There are our pretty white evening dresses, and those green things that Kitty made us get, I am certain, because she knew we’d be frights in them; but what about her crimson frock and that new dark-blue velvet which she insisted on getting in the middle of the term, trimmed with real lace too? And then, there’s that new pale primrose evening frock and two white India muslin frocks. She got those things quite lately, in order to be properly dressed at the Wyndhams’. Those items will swamp the bill. What is to be done?”