“Do you not agree with me?” the younger sister asked after a moment’s silence. Shyness was unknown to Ella, as were hesitation and patience when she was much concerned about anything.
Madelene turned round and looked at her.
“She’s angry,” thought Ella. “It is not any other feeling that makes her look like that.” And she kept her own bright eyes fixed upon her sister, which did not add to Miss St Quentin’s composure.
“Of course if you were obliged to go anywhere in this—this strange sort of way, you did right to come here,” said Madelene quietly. “But that is not the question at all. Were you right to leave your aunt’s house as you have done? That is the thing.”
“Yes,” said Ella coolly, “under the circumstances I think I was quite right.”
“Without consulting papa, without talking it over with Mrs Robertson, without—without,” Miss St Quentin went on, a sudden sensation of something very like temper nerving her to say it—“without in the least considering our—Ermine’s and my—convenience?”
Ella gazed at her in unfeigned surprise, for a moment or two she was too astonished to feel indignant.
“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Is it usual for sisters to be upon such terms? Is a daughter expected to beg and apologise like a stranger, before getting leave to come home—home where she has a right to be, and from which she was banished without her wishes being consulted in the least?”
“You were a baby,” said Madelene. “You could not have been consulted. And—well the thing was done and this has not been your home, and it is no use talking in that exaggerated, theatrical sort of way, Ella. I shall do my best, my very best,” and here there was a little tremor in her voice, “to make you happy and content with us, and so I know will Ermine, but I can’t say that in what you have done to-day I think you have acted wisely, or—or rightly. What papa will say about it I don’t know. I—I did not mean to put forward any inconvenience to myself, or ourselves, in any prominent way.”
She had already regretted the allusion to her sister and herself that she had made. It was, she felt, both unwise and inconsistent with the resolution she had come to.