Captain Chancellor bade them good-night at their own door. Sydney fancied his manner a little odd—more abrupt, less self-possessed than usual, when he shook hands with her. He did not call the next day, as she somehow half expected, nor the day after, and Eugenia did not seem surprised. She did not look well, Sydney fancied; and when urged by her sister to tell what was wrong, she confessed, to having felt over fatigued since Saturday’s long walk.
“She has many and many a time walked to Ayclough and back without being tired,” thought Sydney. “There must be something wrong. Can they have quarrelled?”
Possessed with this idea, she watched eagerly for Captain Chancellor’s next appearance, and thought it doubly unlucky that Frank’s absence from home for a day or two should have happened at this crisis, when through him she might have learnt something of what was the matter, and if anything lay within her power to do for her sister. To a superficial observer, poor Sydney, during these few days, would have looked the more anxious and unhappy of the two. It was as sad as strange to her to believe Eugenia in suffering, and to be in ignorance of the cause.
On Thursday evening the sisters were sitting by themselves in the drawing-room, their father busy writing in his own little room, when there came a ring at the front door bell. Up jumped Sydney, her heart beating considerably faster than its wont, her face full of eagerness.
“That must be Frank,” observed Eugenia, quietly.
For the time being, the sisters seemed to have changed characters.
“Frank!” exclaimed Sydney; and though it was five days since she had seen her fiancé, at the supposition, her face fell. “Oh, no, it can’t be Frank! He was not to return till Friday—that’s to-morrow.”
But Frank it was. No trace of disappointment was legible in Eugenia’s countenance as she welcomed him rather more cordially than usual, whereas Sydney’s manner was preoccupied and almost cold. Frank was tired, however, and very glad to be home again; and not being gifted with the quickest perception in the world, discovered nothing amiss. Eugenia rang for tea for him, and he drew in his chair near the fire, and sat there drinking it in comfortable content, telling them all about his journey and adventures, and what a charming little country parsonage he had been staying at—“The very place for you and me, Sydney, when we get old, and past hard work.” And Sydney smiled, without seeming to hear what he was saying. Then a new thought struck Frank.
“Oh, by-the-bye,” he exclaimed, “did you see Chancellor before he left? He went off quite in a hurry at the end. He told me on Saturday evening he was expecting to go soon, but he thought he would be here through this week. And this evening I got a letter from him from some place or other—Wins— something—his home, I suppose—saying how sorry he was not to have seen me, to say good-bye—some family arrangements, he said, had called him off in a hurry at the last.”
“I saw a note in his handwriting addressed to papa on the hall-table. It came by this evening’s post. No doubt, it was saying the same thing,” said Eugenia.