She threw her arms round her sister now with a protecting gesture she herself was unconscious of, and hurried to get ready for dinner, in a way that Grace Rivers hardly would have done some days before. At any rate, she had learnt one lesson—not to be late for anything Mr. Sandford was connected with.
The two girls went into the drawing-room only as dinner was announced by an insignificant little bell, and Mr. Sandford marched off with his sister.
Placing her at the head of the table, he said in his most pompous manner, "It is my wish that you act as mistress of my house, and that all should consider you in that light," and he glared round as though many were there to hear this, and not only two girls who already understood this.
Mrs. Dorriman, conscious of an action antagonistic to his wishes, sat silent, feeling as though she were a traitor; never was there any one more acutely self-tormenting, more sensitive about anything she did, than this poor lady. She was perpetually worrying herself about trifles she might, or should, have done or left undone, and this was no trifle; though she little thought that her presence in her brother's house, and her being uprooted from her little home, was due to the colour and agitation that had betrayed to her brother that she had knowledge of the papers he wished to possess.
She roused herself after a time and was then for the first time conscious of Margaret's changed manner.
All the sweetness and kindness which had so cheered her advent, and lessened the pain of her arrival, had gone, and was replaced by a cold indifference—which was Margaret's only possible way of being unlike herself.
Poor Mrs. Dorriman imagined that she was in some way in fault, and blamed herself for her abstraction, but her efforts were quite unavailing—the girl's one anxiety was to prove her loyalty and allegiance to her sister. She was conscious of a dawning feeling of affection for the little woman who sat looking pale and sweet opposite Mr. Sandford's massive figure. She had felt her clinging arms round her, and the feeling had been of comfort and sympathy, but Grace decreed otherwise, and Grace's word was her law.
Never, perhaps, sat four people together whose thoughts were of so different a nature; when four people live together, generally, there is, at any rate a bond of union, some interest, in which, however much they diverge in their thoughts towards it, forms, at last, something in common—here there was nothing!
Mr. Sandford, at other times an acute observer, noticed nothing to-night. The face of his sister opposite to him affected him strangely. No one had so faced him since his wife had died, and he was so busy looking through the long vista of years, and seeing the one creature he had ever loved, looking back at him from the past, that he ate mechanically and did not speak.
At length he roused himself and addressed Mrs. Dorriman, "I hope you will bring things into better order," he said abruptly; "if the cook cannot do better than this, you must change her. I look to you. I'm not a dainty man, but I pay for the best and I intend having the best."