“Sit down for a minute or two, can’t you, my dear?” said her father, as Madelene stood beside him; “it fidgets me to see you standing. Surely Ermine can look after that child for a few minutes.”
“Oh, yes,” Miss St Quentin replied, drawing a chair close to her father’s as she spoke.
“It’s about her I want to speak of course,” Colonel St Quentin went on. “I have been thinking a great deal about her even in the hour or two since she came. What are we to do with her, Madelene?” Madelene could not help smiling a little at her father’s overwhelmed tone. He who had faced unmoved all the dangers and vicissitudes of a soldier’s life, who had not so many years ago borne with comparative equanimity the complete loss of all the fortune he could really call his own, now seemed quite unnerved by what was surely but a most natural, not to say agreeable event, the return of his youngest child to her home.
“Oh, papa, don’t worry about her,” she said. “Things will settle themselves, you’ll see. It is only the awkwardness of her sudden arrival that makes you feel uneasy about her. She must be a nice child—she couldn’t be your daughter and poor Ellen’s—” since the death of her young stepmother, Miss St Quentin had half-unconsciously adopted the habit of speaking of her by her Christian name—“without having a true and good nature au fond.”
“If she only were a child,” said her father, “but it strikes me pretty forcibly,” he went on, smiling a little, though rather grimly, in spite of himself, “that she is, and considers herself very decidedly a young woman. She’s very pretty too, and knows how to set herself off, that little black frock with those fal-de-rals, rosettes—what do you call ’em?”
“Bows,” corrected Madelene.
“Bows then—was very coquettishly managed.”
“It was too old for her,” said Miss St Quentin decidedly. “And—not altogether good style for so young a girl as she really is. I fancy Mrs Robertson has left her a good deal to herself, of late especially. I think it was time she came to us, papa,” she added. “Indeed I only wish—” but she stopped.
“That she had never left us—but don’t say it, Madelene. It’s no use, and—I don’t know that she would have been alive but for Phillis’s care.”
“Perhaps not,” said Madelene. “Still, she is not like her mother—she has not that transparent look.” She did not say more, reserving to herself her private opinion that Ella was and always had been, her slight make notwithstanding, a most sturdy little person, for which indeed there was every precedent, as young Mrs St Quentin had been the only delicate member of her own family. “It may perhaps soften papa to think her not strong,” she said to herself.