“There’s nothing strange in that, considering they are sisters,” answered Bell angrily.
“O, but you’ve no right to say that, Mrs. Bell; it’s going too far.”
“Haven’t I a right to use my eyes and ears? Can’t I see the family look in those two faces, though Miss Mildred is pretty and Miss Fay is plain? Can’t I hear the same tones in the two voices, and haven’t I seen his way of bringing that girl into the house, and his guilty look before my poor injured mistress? Of course they’re sisters. Who could ever doubt it? She doesn’t, I know, poor dear.”
She, in this connection, meant Mrs. Fausset.
There was only one point in this speech which the innocent child seized upon. She and Fay were said to be sisters. O, how she had longed for a sister in the last year or so of her life, since she had found out the meaning of solitude among fairest surroundings! How all the brightest things she possessed had palled upon her for want of sisterly companionship! How she had longed for a baby-sister even, and had envied the children in households where a new baby was an annual institution! She had wondered why her mother did not treat herself to a new baby occasionally, as so many of her mother’s friends did. And now Fay had been given to her, ever so much better than a baby, which would have taken such a long time to grow up. Mildred had never calculated how long, but she concluded that it would be some months before the most forward baby would be of a companionable age. Fay had been given to her—a ready-made companion, versed in fairy tales, able to conjure up an enchanted world out of the schoolroom piano, skilful with pencil and colour-box, able to draw the faces and figures and palaces and woodlands of that fairy world, able to amuse and entertain her in a hundred ways. And Fay was her sister after all. She dropped asleep in a flutter of pleasurable excitement. She would ask her mother all about it to-morrow; and in the meantime she would say nothing to Fay. It was fun to have a secret from Fay.
A batch of visitors left next day after lunch. Mr. and Mrs. Fausset were to be alone for forty-eight hours, a rare oasis of domesticity in the society desert. Mildred had been promised that the first day there was no company she was to have tea with mamma in the tent on the lawn. She claimed the fulfilment of that promise to-day.
It was a lovely day after the sultry, thundery night. Mrs. Fausset reclined in her basket-chair in the shelter of the tent. Fay and Mildred sat side by side on a low bamboo bench on the grass: the little girl, fairy-like, in her white muslin and flowing flaxen hair, the big girl in olive-coloured alpaca, with dark hair clustering in short curls about the small intelligent head. There could hardly have been a stronger contrast than that between the two girls; and yet Bell was right. There was a family look, an undefinable resemblance of contour and expression which would have struck a very attentive observer—something in the line of the delicate eyebrow, something in the angle of the forehead.
“Mamma,” said Mildred suddenly, clambering into her mother’s lap, “why mayn’t I call Fay sister?”
Mrs. Fausset started, and flushed crimson.
“What nonsense, child! Why, because it would be most ridiculous.”