It was true. Ella was much softened; her sore heart was grateful for kindness, and she was ashamed to recall her childish petulance and impertinence to her aunt’s husband. But kind as the Burtons were to her, there were often times when she regretted that she had not been allowed to take her own way; for life was dull and dreary to her. She missed the companionship of her sisters, little as she had prized it while with them. Madelene’s gentleness and refinement, Ermine’s merry humour and bright intellect had become more to her than she had in the least realised. “If only, oh, if only they had loved me a little,” she repeated to herself.
Time passed—slowly enough to Ella; at the end of a week she felt as if she had been a month with her aunt; at the end of a fortnight she could have believed a year had gone by since she left Coombesthorpe; before the first month was over the whole of the past year began to seem to her like a strangely mingled dream of pain and pleasure. She wrote to Madelene, gently and regretfully, but vaguely, and Madelene who had been longing for this letter, and building some hopes upon it, felt saddened and discouraged. She handed it to Ermine, who read it carefully.
“Can you understand her?” asked Miss St Quentin.
Ermine knitted her brows.
“Not altogether,” she said. “But, Maddie, I don’t despair yet of things coming right somehow. I suppose,” she added with a little smile, “when one is happy one’s self, it is easier to feel hopeful about other people, even—” but here she hesitated; “even about you and Bernard.”
“Oh, Ermine, do leave that subject alone,” said Madelene.
“Next week I shall write to Ella,” said Ermine, “papa will let me send a message from him I feel sure.”
Ella had been fully four weeks at Mrs Burton’s when Ermine’s letter came. It was a mild day in March, one of the occasional early spring days which are not false to their name; Ella had persuaded her aunt to let her go for a walk by herself, and with many injunctions as to the direction she was to take, and the roads and paths she was not to wander from, Mrs Burton had consented. In spite of herself the fresh, yet soft air, the sensation of “promise” in the birds’ chirpings, and the few all but invisible green specks in the hedges, still more the discovery of a lingering snowdrop or two, and of something not unlike buds here and there among the primrose tufts, gave her a thrill of keen pleasure and invigoration.
“I wish I could go away—quite away, ever so far,” she said to herself. “I should like to make a fresh start and show them all I am not the spoilt, self-willed child they have thought me. I wish they would write and tell me about Ermine’s engagement, it must be openly announced by now. I do wish they would tell me of it, and then I think I would take courage and write to dear godmother. I am afraid she is very angry with me, and no wonder. It must have seemed very unnatural to her that if I was in trouble at home I did not go to her, when she was so sympathising about my thinking Madelene didn’t care for me. But Cheynesacre was the last, the very last place I could have gone to.”
She was crossing the wide breezy downs not far from Mrs Burton’s house on the outskirts of the town. Already the short afternoon was closing in, and the colours in the sky, softened by the wintry haze, announced the approaching sunset. Ella stood still to admire.