“Except to make her angry with you,” said Ermine. “That is usually the fate of the warner in such cases.”
“And perhaps it put the idea more in her head than it was,” added Madelene, regretfully. “They say, Ermine, that Philip is a great deal at the Belvoirs’ now, and Leonora is certainly a very nice girl.”
“Rubbish,” said Ermine. “He has known Leonora Belvoir since she was a baby, and seen her constantly. And she is not half as pretty, as Ella. If only Ella had come back sooner, I think I could have got Guildford to find out about it,” she added meditatively. “I suppose you couldn’t get Bernard to do so?”
Madelene grew crimson.
“Ermine, how can you be so thoughtless?” she exclaimed. “It is really unkind of you. I hope most earnestly, as you know, that Captain Omar will not come. Philip knows I do not want him to come.”
But Ermine said no more.
The day of the marriage was bright and sunny. When Ella woke up, and saw from her window the familiar scene in all its summer beauty, she shut her eyes for a moment, while a sort of fantastic wish went through her that the last few months might prove to be only a dream, that she had only now arrived for the first time at her home, and that all happy possibilities lay before her. She was again in her old “nursery”—she had begged that it might be so, though the rooms her sisters had originally intended for her were long ago ready.
“Oh, dear, if I could but go back again, how different I would be,” she thought. “How is it? Madelene and Ermine seem so different now—it is as if scales had fallen from my eyes. I wonder,” she went on, “I wonder if I had never remembered that silly old fancy about being like Cinderella—I wonder if Harvey had never put it into my head, if things would have turned out better? How sad it seems that bad or foolish things should stick to us like burrs all through the years, and that good and wise and useful things should be so quickly forgotten!”
She roused herself before long however; there was plenty for her to do this wedding-day. She was full of the wish to be of all the help and support she possibly could be to Madelene. For calm and quiet as Miss St Quentin appeared, Ella well knew that the parting with her sister, her “other self,” for such indeed Ermine had been to her, was no light matter, no slight wrench. And this reflection bore good fruit with the youngest sister.
“I will never call Madelene cold or heartless again,” she thought. “I know how she loves Ermine, and yet she is quietly smiling and calm—a stranger might say she did not mind it at all.”