“Dear Ella,” he added softly.
“I will do my best,” she repeated. And to herself she said, believing that she fully realised her words, that come what would she would deserve his approval. “Even if he is only to be—a sort of brother to me,” she thought, “I would like him to see that I try to be good.”
And she believed it was as a reward for her heroism that the world all about her looked so bright again, and some faint rays of wintry sunshine that lighted up the frost-besprinkled fields and palely gilded the tops of the dark fir-trees, seemed to her to glow with the warmth and brilliance of a midsummer sky.
Christmas passed with cheerfulness, if not exactly with “jollity,” at Coombesthorpe. Colonel St Quentin was still too much of an invalid to stand a large party, but a few old friends and neighbours joined the family circle. Madelene was quiet as ever, but gentle and almost affectionate to Ella, who, true to her promise, received her elder sister’s advances in good part and refrained from all sharp or icy retorts, even when, as must happen, however good the will on both sides, perfect unanimity of opinion was not the case. And Ermine was in such tremendously good spirits that the infection of them was to some extent irresistible. She was so gracious to Philip that he, in his own mind, was a little puzzled by it, for a coldness, slight but yet to themselves tangible enough, still seemed to hang between Madelene and himself. His cousins for once seemed to be at issue, he fancied, and he was small enough to try to punish Madelene by a show of even extra responsiveness to Ermine.
And Ella watched and wondered; sometimes feeling certain that her misgivings as to the state of things between Philip and Ermine were founded on fact; sometimes rising to a flutter of delight and hopefulness at some slight incident which seemed to prove to her conclusively that there was “nothing in it.”
“If there were,” she said to herself more than once, “would Madelene be vexed with him; as I am almost sure she is?”
And yet—that there was perfect good feeling between him and Ermine she could not doubt, and what that might not mean in reality she could not bear to think!
Wednesday—for Christmas day had been a Tuesday—saw the whole party scattered. Lady Cheynes returned home; Ermine started on her journey to Shenewood Park, whither Philip was to follow her the next day from Cheynesacre. And Ella, as she stood at the window watching the last carriage disappear, felt that now was the real test of her promise to Philip. The prospect of a whole fortnight alone with Madelene; Madelene quieter and “duller,” as Ella expressed it, than she had yet known her, was not inspiriting. For curiously enough, though it was Ermine whom the girl’s fancy had erected into a rival, it was not on her, but entirely on her elder sister that she resented the fact.
“I could never dislike Ermine. She is so bright and open,” thought Ella, while a tear or two trickled unbidden down her face. “Even as Philip’s wife I don’t think I could ever be jealous of her. But it is so different with Madelene; everything is calculation with her. She has settled that it would be a good thing for them to marry, and she is determined to carry it out—whether they care enough for each other or not. She has never cared for any one—that’s certain.”
The mood was not a very propitious one, for some vague warnings which Miss St Quentin unluckily thought it her duty to give her younger sister. It was when they were sitting together in the already fading light that afternoon—Ella after fidgeting about restlessly the whole day, having at last taken a book and settled herself in the library where Madelene was already installed with what the younger girl mentally dubbed “that everlasting knitting of hers.”