“I did so want to have the rooms arranged the way Ermine and I were planning,” she said to herself. “It would have been so much better to have begun regularly at once. Now I really don’t know what to do. Papa would certainly be displeased if I gave her one of the long corridor ones, and yet the two or three empty rooms in the south wing are so small and would seem shabby. But I am afraid there is nothing else to do. I must explain to her that the rooms intended for her can’t possibly be ready for some time. And about the maids too—we had planned it so well. Now, there will really be no one able to look after her, for I can’t trust Mélanie; she is so injudicious with that chattering tongue of hers.”
Meantime, the cause of all these discussions was waiting alone in the library. She had seated herself when first shown in, in a matter-of-course, unrestrained manner, as if quite at her ease. But this had been for the benefit of Barnes and his subordinates. No sooner was she left alone, than the girl got up and strolled nervously towards the window, where she stood looking out. Now that the deed was done, her courage began to flag.
“I wonder,” she said to herself, clasping her little hands together, “I wonder what they’ll say. They surely can’t blame me, when I tell them how unendurable it was, and that even Aunt Phillis, in her heart, though she wouldn’t own it, wished I were gone, for I know she did. She’ll have got my telegram by now. How delighted old Burton will be—that’s the only bit of it I hate to think of! Still, staying there to spite him would have been quarrelling with my nose—is that it?—no, quarrelling with my face—oh bother, I can’t get it right, I do so wonder what they’ll all say here.”
There was nothing to help her in what she saw outside—not a human being was in sight—only the lovely, perfectly kept grounds, looking perhaps at their very best in the soft mellowness of the summer afternoon.
“How delightful it is here!” she thought next; “what a beautiful room, and what splendid books,” and her girlish heart swelled with satisfaction to think that here was her home, the spot on earth where she had an undoubted, an unquestionable right to be! “How poky auntie’s house would seem in comparison—and Mr Burton’s ‘mansion’ even worse, for any way there was nothing vulgar or parvenu about our little house. Still—it does seem rather a shame that I should have been out of it all, all these years, I, that have just as good a right, as poor old Harvey used to tell me, to everything here as Madelene and Ermine. I do hope I shall be able to like them—of course I must not let myself be ‘put upon,’ but still—I consider they have kept the best of things to themselves hitherto and—oh I wish she’d be quick and come. I don’t want to seem nervous and yet I am, horribly so.”
She tapped her parasol on the floor, then she glanced furtively in a mirror to see how she was looking.
“My hair’s rather rough,” she thought, “but otherwise I don’t think I look bad. I wish I didn’t seem quite so young—and, oh, I do wish I were a little taller!”
She was small certainly, but as she was also slight and very well proportioned, this did not really detract from her—beauty, one could scarcely call it. Ella St Quentin was not beautiful; she was just exceedingly pretty. Her hair was brown, a shade lighter than Ermine’s perhaps, but dark in comparison with Madelene’s fair coils, and her eyes were hazel, lovely eyes, pathetic and merry by turns, as it suited their capricious little owner to make them, and her features were all charming. There were good points in this pretty face too, real sweetness in the curves of the mouth, frankness and honesty in the forehead and no lack of resolution in the chin—but the whole was the face of a child rather than a woman—a well-meaning, but fitful and undisciplined child, who had known little of life and its graver lessons, whom one would tremble to expose to the storms which, sooner or later, in one form or another, all must face. Yet there was latent strength too, if one looked more closely; it was a face to make one anxious but hopeful also.
She was well but simply dressed. Save for the extreme neatness of everything about her, she would have looked a mere school-girl; but the sweeps of her grey draperies, the poise of her head, nay, the very fit of her gloves, at once removed her from any possibility of being relegated to the category of girlish hobbledehoys. She had not a trace of awkwardness about her; she had passed through all the stages of teeth-changing, hair “doing up,” skirts lengthening and such crises, as one to the manner born—awkwardness and Ella were not to be thought of in the same century.
The door opening at last, Ella flashed round from the window—was it the door, or her fancy only? For now all seemed still again, no, yes—the handle was moving a very little—truth to tell, Madelene holding the outside knob, was making a last effort to screw up her courage so as to meet her young sister affectionately but with all her wits about her nevertheless.