Then they read the letter over again more than once indeed, with eager anxiety to discover from the written lines all they possibly could as to the writer.
“It is a nice manly letter,” said Madelene at last. “But Ermine will be angry, I fear.”
And Ella meanwhile had flown up stairs to her “nursery,” the scene of her mature as well as of her childish trials. It had come at last, the certainty of the event she had so dreaded. Ermine and Philip were to be openly engaged. Must she stay to see it? Could she bear it? Pride said yes; her hot, undisciplined girl’s heart said no. And in this conflict she passed the morning, till suddenly a sort of compromise suggested itself. She would write to her Aunt Phillis—surely she could trust her? “I will tell her that I am very unhappy here and ask her to write at once inviting me to go to her. She will do it, I am sure. I will promise her to be as nice as possible to Mr Burton. Oh, if only I can get away I shall not care about him or anything!”
Chapter Seventeen.
Ella Overhears.
The letter was soon written. But then came the question of how to post it. Ella would not send it openly with the rest of the letters as usual, for she was afraid of Madelene’s catching sight of it.
“I will take it to the post-office in the village myself,” she decided. “They won’t miss me. They are far too busy and absorbed about Ermine. And Sir Philip will very likely be coming over to luncheon. How I wish I could say I was ill and keep out of the way! It is too hard to feel myself a complete stranger and alien in my own home—and it will cut me off from dear godmother too. I can never see much of her now.”
A few minutes saw her wrapped up and making her way down the drive. It reminded her of that other morning only a very few weeks ago when she had found little Hetty in distress at the lodge and had stopped to help her, and when, all unconscious of her smutty face, she had met Philip at the gate. She had not even known his name then, and now—if only he had not been Philip Cheynes, but a stranger as she had imagined him! He had once wished she were really “Miss Wyndham.”