‘I can’t realise Roger there in papa’s library,’ said Cara, ‘or upstairs. Am I to live there? in the drawing-room. Will it never be changed?’
‘It is so pretty, Cara—and you would like the things to be as pleased her,’ said Miss Cherry, in trembling tones.
Cara did not make any response—her face wore a doubtful expression, but she did not say anything. She turned her back upon the landscape, and looked up at the house. ‘Shall I never come back just the same?’ she said. ‘Roger says so; but he is not clever—how should he know? what should change me? But the Square is not like the Hill,’ she added, with a little shiver. ‘Papa will not think of me as you do—everything for Cara; that will make a change.’
‘But you can think of him,’ said Cherry, ‘everything for him; and, perhaps, for a woman that is the happiest way of the two.’
Once more Cara was silent. Clouds of doubt, of reluctance, of unwilling repugnance, were floating through her mind. She had a horror and fear of the Square, in which her life was henceforward to be passed—and of her father, of whom she knew so much more than he was aware. For a moment the old tumult in her soul about the secret she had never told came surging back upon her, a sudden tide from which she could scarcely escape. ‘Come, Aunt Cherry,’ she said, suddenly seizing her astonished companion by the arm. ‘Come and play for us. We must have a dance on the lawn my last day.’
CHAPTER X.
THE SQUARE.
It was a rainy afternoon when Cara reached the Square. It had been settled, against Miss Cherry’s will, that she was to go alone. The girl, who was often ‘queer,’ especially when anything connected with her natural home, her father’s house, was in question, had requested that it should be so—and Miss Charity approved, to whose final decision everything was submitted at Sunninghill. ‘Don’t interfere with her,’ Miss Charity had said; ‘she is like her mother. She has a vein of caprice in her. You never could argue (if you remember) with poor Annie. You had either to give in to her, or to say no once for all, and stick to it. Carry is not like her mother all through—there are gleams of the Beresford in her. But there is a vein of caprice, and I wouldn’t cross her, just at this crisis of her life.’
‘But I don’t see why it should be such a crisis. It is a change of scene, to be sure, and leaving us ought to be a trial,’ said Miss Cherry, dubiously. The feeling within herself was, that she would have been glad had she been more sure that this was a trial. Girls were ungrateful in their lightheartedness, and sometimes loved the risks of independence. ‘It is not as if she were going among strangers,’ said Miss Cherry. ‘She is going to her home, and to her father.’
‘A father whom she has never known since she was a child—a house that has never lost the shadow of that dying!’