“Ah, well—perhaps I can get some one to go with you for once. But you know we are all very busy people here.”
She spoke to one of the elder ladies, who undertook to accompany Ella. For Mrs Ward felt it right to take special care of the girl in her peculiar position. Yet she knew that it was well for her to have the practical side of the future she had chosen brought home to her. “If her people really care for her,” thought Mrs Ward, “they can easily get her to go home again. She is tiring of it already.”
But she scarcely understood the character she had to deal with.
Ella went out with Miss Lister, and though the walk was only to a music shop where her companion had to choose a large selection of “pieces” for her pupils, and though the day was so cold and gloomy as to suggest impending fog, the mere fact of being out of doors and walking quickly raised her impressionable spirits again. She was in a decidedly less conciliatory mood than before going out, and it was with a heightened colour and resolutely compressed lips that she received the parlour-maid’s announcement that a lady had come to see her, and was waiting in the drawing-room.
“Madelene, no doubt,” thought Ella with a rush of curiously mingled feeling, among which considerably to her own surprise she was conscious that there vibrated a thrill of something very like delight.
“Do I care for her, after all?” she thought. But before she had time to answer the question, other sensations followed. Madelene had come to urge her return, Madelene who knew, or at least suspected the root of her bitterest suffering; Madelene who had planned and schemed for Ermine regardless of the poor little half-sister! Ella hardened her heart.
“No,” she thought, “I will not go home. No. She may beg and pray me to do so, I will not. Not at least for a long, long time, till I have got accustomed to it all—to Ermine and Philip—or at least till I have learnt to hide what I feel. And when they see how firm I am they will have to give in and let me go to that German place. I don’t care what it is or how rough it is if only I can get away.”
She looked and felt cool and determined enough, as, after a moment’s pause outside the drawing-room door, she turned the handle and entered. Only the two bright red spots on her cheeks betrayed any inward disturbance.
“Madelene,” she began at once, before her eyes had taken in any details of the figure that rose from the sofa at the sound of the door opening. But in an instant she stopped, the words on her lips died away as a keen dart of disappointment sped through her.
“No, no, my darling, not Madelene. Only your poor old auntie,” and in a moment she was enfolded in Mrs Burton’s embrace. “Oh, Ella, my dear, I have been so miserable about you ever since Sir—ever since your sister sent to me! Oh, my child, you see how it has ended. Why did you leave me as you did? All might have been happy and peaceful. Mr Burton’s heart is really such a kind one—it is only manner, my dear. You will get to see it is only manner, I can assure you—”