“You can read to me if you like,” he said. “I think I have exhausted the papers, but this book is rather interesting. Madelene is reading it to me but she can finish it to herself afterwards.”
Half pleased and half frightened, Ella took the book. She had done herself scant justice in saying she read “pretty well.” She read very well indeed, and at the end of three-quarters of an hour Colonel St Quentin looked up with real gratification.
“Thank you, my dear,” he said. “That is a good place to stop at, I think. I have enjoyed it very much. Now I shall rest a while, for I hope to be able to come in to dine with you. It would be too dreary for you all alone.”
Ella did not reply, but her father saw that her face flushed again a little.
“You are not looking as well as I should like to see you,” he said. “Do you not feel well?”
“Oh, yes,” said Ella, touched in spite of herself. “I’m quite well, thank you, papa, but,” and here, in spite of all her heroic resolutions to endure in silence, the girl’s impulsive nature burst out—“it is rather dull. I have tried to do as you wished about my lessons and practising, and I like them, but it is rather dull,” she repeated.
“While your sisters are away, you mean? Just this day or two?” asked Colonel St Quentin.
“No, I meant altogether,” answered Ella frankly. “I—I’ve been accustomed to more variety I suppose, and at auntie’s I wasn’t considered a mere child. I think it’s that that makes it seem so dull.”
Colonel St Quentin made no reply for a moment or two. He sat, leaning his head on his hand, considering deeply. It seemed as if what Madelene had tried to warn him of had come true. Had he made a mistake in the tone he had insisted upon being taken with Ella? He had never liked her so well as to-day, nor felt so drawn to her, and quite unreasonably he became almost inclined to blame his elder daughters for not “managing better.”
“I have given in to their wish that no formal explanations should be made to her, not,” they said, “till they had gained her affection and confidence.”