Hester looked after her, panting and wounded. Aunt Alsie repel—refuse her!—Aunt Alsie!—who had always been her special possession and chattel. It had been taken for granted in the family, year after year, that if no one else was devoted to Hester, Aunt Alsie's devotion, at least, never failed. Hester's clothes were Miss Puttenham's special care; it was for Hester that she stitched and embroidered. Hester was to inherit her jewels and her money. In all Hester's scrapes it was Aunt Alice who stood by her, who had often carried her off bodily out of reach of the family anger, to the Lakes, to the sea—once even, to Italy.
And from her childhood Hester had coolly taken it all for granted, had never been specially grateful, or much more amenable to counsels from Aunt Alice than from anybody else. The slender, graceful woman, so gentle, plaintive and reserved, so easily tyrannized over, had never seemed to mean much to her. Yet now, as she stood looking at the door through which Miss Puttenham had disappeared, the girl was conscious of a profound and passionate sense of grievance, and of something deeper, beneath it. The sensation that held her was new and unbearable.
Then in a moment her temperament turned pain into anger. She ran to the window and down the steps into the garden.
"If she had told me"—she said to herself, with the childish fury that mingled in her with older and maturer things—"I might have told her. Now—I fend for myself!"
CHAPTER X
Meanwhile, in the room upstairs, Alice Puttenham lying with her face pressed against the back of the chair into which she had feebly dropped, heard Hester run down the steps, tried to call, or rise, and could not. Since the death of Judith Sabin she had had little or no sleep, and much less food than usual, with—all the while—the pressure of a vague corrosive terror on nerve and brain. The shock of that miniature in Hester's hands had just turned the scale; endurance had given way.
The quick footsteps receded. Yet she could do nothing to arrest them. Her mind floated in darkness.
Presently out of the darkness emerged a sound, a touch—a warm hand on hers.
"Dear—dear Miss Puttenham!"
"Yes."