Colonel St Quentin glanced up at his daughter as she spoke. Her face was a little flushed with the interest of what she was saying, but still she looked ill and less serene than her wont.
“I don’t see why you should speak so of yourself, Maddie,” he said kindly. “When I get round again—when the weather’s a little better, perhaps, couldn’t we ask a few people? It might cheer us up—and little Ella would enjoy it.”
Miss St Quentin listened in surprise, not wholly unmingled with a less innocent sensation. For Madelene was not perfect.
“He would do for Ella already what he has never dreamt of doing for me,” she thought with a passing flash of bitterness. But she quickly overcame it. “If you felt able for it, certainly, papa. We might think of some nice people. That would be when Ermine comes back. Let me see—when do the Marchants want her?”
She took up the letter which her father held out to her, and some discussion as to the journey and other details followed. And then Madelene, with a brighter face than she had had for some time, went off to summon Ermine to an interview with her father.
At luncheon that day Ella was struck with the increased cheerfulness of the family party, and for some little time her powers of discernment were baffled as to the cause.
“Can papa have decided I am not to go, and can they be looking so pleased on that account?” she said to herself. “Can they—Madelene at least, for after all it is she that is looking the cheeriest, can she be so horrid?”
But as no allusion was made to the Cheynesacre invitation—which in point of fact had for the moment been forgotten by the elders of the party in the greater excitement of Ermine’s projected visit—she could not or would not not approach the subject, till her elder sister and she happened to be by themselves. Then said Ella in a voice which though sounding timid and even meek was in reality soft with restrained indignation.
“Have you asked papa, Madelene? Is—is Ermine to go, then?”
“Of course,” Miss St Quentin replied. “He decided at once and he has told her so. In her heart I am sure she is pleased though she is pretending to grumble a little. But I am so pleased—and I am sure Philip will be too to see her there, though he won’t be there the first part of the time.”