She remembered just such an autumn as this, a peerless autumn spent with her father at The Hook—spent for the most part on the river and in the garden, the sunny days and moonlit nights being far too lovely for any one to waste indoors. Her seventeenth birthday was not long past. It was just ten years since she had come home to that house to find Fay had vanished from it, and to shed bitter tears for the loss of her companion. Never since that time had she seen Fay’s face. Her questions had been met coldly or angrily by her mother; and even her father had answered her with unsatisfactory brevity.
All she could learn was that Fay had been sent to complete her education at a finishing-school at Brussels.
“At school! O, poor Fay! I hope she is happy.”
“She ought to be,” Mrs. Fausset answered peevishly. “The school is horridly expensive. I saw one of the bills the other day. Simply enormous. The girls are taken to the opera, and have all sorts of absurd indulgences.”
“Still, it is only school, mother, not home,” said Mildred compassionately.
This was two years after Fay had vanished. No letter had ever come from her to Mildred, though Mildred was able to write now, in her own sprawling childish fashion, and would have been delighted to answer any such letter. She had herself indited various epistles to her friend, but had not succeeded in getting them posted. They had drifted to the waste-paper basket, mute evidences of wasted affection.
As each holiday time came round the child asked if Fay were coming home, always to receive the same saddening negative.
One day, when she had been more urgent than usual, Mrs. Fausset lost temper and answered sharply,
“No, she is not coming. She is never coming. I don’t like her, and I don’t intend ever to have her in any house of mine, so you may as well leave off plaguing me about her.”
“But, mother, why don’t you like her?”