Chapter Two.
Eleven Years After.
Summer, not spring now. But the same garden and the same people in it—three of them, that is to say, little chance though there might be at the first glance, of our recognising them.
They were sitting together on the lawn—the two sisters Madelene and Ermine and their cousin Philip. They were less changed than he perhaps—Madelene especially, for she had always been tall, and at fourteen had looked older than her years, whereas now at five-and-twenty one could scarcely have believed her to be as much. She had fulfilled the promise of her girlhood for she was an undoubtedly beautiful woman, though to those who knew her but superficially, she might have seemed wanting in animation, for she was quiet almost to coldness, thoughtful and self-controlled, weighing well her words before she spoke and slow in making up her mind to any decision.
Ermine, brown-haired and brown-eyed, brilliantly handsome, was more popular than her elder sister. But rivalry or the shadow of it between the two was unknown. Never were two sisters more completely at one, more trusted and trusting friends.
“They are all in all to each other and to their father,” was the universal description of them. “Almost too much so indeed,” some would add. “It must be because they are so perfectly happy as they are that neither of them is married.”
For why the Misses St Quentin did not marry was every year becoming more and more of a puzzle to their friends and the world at large.
Sir Philip Cheynes got up from the comfortable garden chair on which he had been lounging and leant against the elm under whose wide-spreading branches the little party had established themselves. A table was prepared for tea, Ermine had a book on her knee which she imagined herself to be or to have been reading, Madelene was knitting.