Just then her meditations were interrupted by a knock at the door, and old Hester, the head housemaid, who had been deputed by Madelene to take care of Ella, so far as her material comforts were concerned, came in.
“Miss Ella,” she exclaimed, “whatever are you about? Sitting up here without a fire when it’s as cold as cold. Wouldn’t the Colonel be in a taking if he knew! You could have had a fire lighted if you’d only said the word. And there’s the library, and the little drawing-room as bright and cheery as can be, at your service.”
“I am busy working, thank you, Hester,” Ella replied primly. “I could not take work like this down stairs.”
She did not resent Hester’s reproaches, for the housemaid was an old servant, who had been at Coombesthorpe during the life of Ella’s mother, and was much attached to her.
Hester looked at what Ella was sewing.
“Darning stockings,” she exclaimed. “Now upon my word, I do call that too bad of Stevens. Not but what it’s a very right thing for a young lady, be she who she may, to know how to turn her hand to darning a stocking, but you’ve your studies, my dear, and other things to see to, and—”
“It’s—it’s not exactly Stevens’ fault, Hester,” said Ella, too honest to leave Hester under such a mistaken idea. “She does mend all my things; it is not often she overlooks a hole. But I prefer to do more myself, and I want to accustom myself to going without fires and little things like that, for there is no knowing how I may be placed some day, and I want to be independent.”
Hester looked at her in surprise and perplexity. She knew that the second wife had been portionless, and she knew too, though vaguely, that Coombesthorpe and the bulk of the family revenues had come from the mother of the two elder daughters—but she could not believe that they would ever allow their half-sister to realise this practically in any painful way.
“We none of us know how we may be placed any day for that matter, Miss Ella, my dear. The best of us is in God’s hands and subject to His will, and even if it seems hard we must bow to it. But—you’ve a good home and kind friends—it’s a sort of tempting of Providence like, for you to speak that way.”
She looked at Ella half-inquiringly as she spoke; she wondered how much “the child,” as she mentally called her, knew. “They might have left her in her innocence a bit,” she said to herself half indignantly. On her side Ella was struck by Hester’s tone.