The next day or two passed uneventfully enough. The weather continued bitterly cold, and Colonel St Quentin scarcely ventured to leave his room. One or other of his elder daughters was almost constantly in request to read or talk to him or write his letters. Ella paid him little duty visits and was always kindly received, but the sort of affectionate and almost familiar tone which had begun between the father and daughter while they were alone, seemed to have disappeared. Again there came over the girl the cold mortifying sensation of being but an outsider in her own home, and the vague scheme for her future which had momentarily, in the excitement of her visit to the Manor and the appearance of Philip on the scene, been half-forgotten, began again to haunt her restless little brain.
“This life is too dreary,” she said to herself, “day after day the same. No one to sympathise with me—no one to care what I do or feel or anything. It is becoming unendurable.”
But on the third morning of this unendurable existence—the fourth that is after Sir Philip’s visit to Coombesthorpe—something did happen. The post brought an invitation from Lady Cheynes to Madelene and Ella, to drive over the following afternoon to dine and stay the night with her.
“Ella!” exclaimed Miss St Quentin, involuntarily. “Not you, Ermine?”
“Why not, Ella?” said Ermine, and had she been speaking to any one but her adored Madelene, one would have been inclined to call her tone testy, if not snappish; “why shouldn’t it be Ella? You don’t want to set off like the graces, or the ‘three old maids of Lea,’ or any unfortunate trio of spinsters you like to name, whenever we go a visiting, do you? And I was spending the whole day at Cheynesacre yesterday.”
“Well, then, why didn’t you bring the invitation verbally, or at least you might have told me of it,” said Madelene. “You know Ella is not—”
“Madelene would have liked to hear of it privately, so that I should never have known of it,” thought Ella, while aloud Ermine exclaimed impatiently.
“Not out, are you going to say, Maddie? You can’t give that as an excuse to Aunt Anna, for she certainly thinks she has a right to a voice in Ella’s concerns. And late events show she means to claim her rights too! As for my not bringing the invitation or telling you of it, I was not told to do so by Aunt Anna—you know she has her own ways of doing things.”
Madelene looked,—not annoyed,—but dissatisfied still.
“Did you know she was going to invite us?” she said again to Ermine.