“I certainly don’t think they are much nearer doing so than they were the day she came. It is an uncomfortable state of things altogether,” he said to himself.
Suddenly he looked up.
“How old are you, Ella?” he said abruptly.
“Nearly eighteen, papa. I shall be eighteen in two months,” she replied promptly.
“That is seventeen and ten months,” Colonel St Quentin replied dryly. “Well now, my dear, you can run away. I think I shall manage to get into the dining-room by dinner-time.”
Ella went off.
”‘Run away,’ indeed,” she repeated to herself, “as if I were about three! I wonder he doesn’t ring for my nurse to fetch me.”
Still, on the whole, the interview with her father had raised her spirits.
“I almost think,” reflected Ella, “I almost think that if it were all to come over again, papa would tell Madelene I was to go. Nobody scarcely but would pity me, left here alone, and it would have seemed so much more natural for me to go than either of the others, who have had years and years of it. I’m quite sure, when I’m as old as Madelene I shan’t care about dances and things like that, especially if I’m an old maid.”
The evening passed tranquilly. Colonel St Quentin dined with his daughter, Ella greatly enjoying her seat at the head of the table. And after dinner they spent an hour together in the drawing-room, when Ella very prettily volunteered to play, for her father to judge of her improvement.