Anne opened her desk and took out from an inner drawer the sealed packet which Mr. Mountford had himself taken to the lawyer on the day of his death. The tears rose to her eyes as she took it out, and Rose, though curiosity was so strong in her as almost to quench emotion, felt something coming in her throat at the first sight of her father’s writing, so familiar as it was. ‘For my daughter Anne, not to be opened till Rose’s twenty-first birthday.’ Rose read it aloud, wondering. She felt something come in her throat, but yet she was too curious, too full of the novelty of her own position, to be touched as Anne was. ‘But that may change it all over again,’ she said.
‘It is not likely; he would not have settled things one day and unsettled them the next; especially as nothing had happened in the meantime to make him change again.’
Rose looked very curiously, anxiously, at the letter. She took it in her hand and turned it over and over. ‘It must be about me, anyhow, I suppose——’
‘Yes,’ said Anne, with a faint smile, ‘or me; perhaps he might think, after my work for you was over, that I might want some advice.’
‘I suppose you will be married long before that?’ said Rose, still poising the letter in her hands.
‘I don’t know—it is too early to talk of what is going to be done. You are tired, Rosie—go to bed.’
‘Why should I be tired more than you? You have been doing a great deal, and I have been doing nothing. That is like mamma’s way of always supposing one is tired, and wants to go to bed. I hate bed. Anne, I suppose you will get married—there can be nothing against it, now—only I don’t believe he has any money: and if you have no money either——’
‘Don’t let us talk on the subject, dear—it is too early, it hurts me—and I want to finish my letter. Sit down by the fire—there is a very comfortable chair, and a book—if you don’t want to go to bed.’
‘Are you writing to Mr. Douglas, Anne?’
Anne answered only with a slight nod of her head. She had taken her pen into her hand. She could not be harsh to her little sister this day above all others, in which her little sister had been made the means of doing her so much harm—but it cost her an effort to be patient. Rose, for her part, had no science to gain information from the inflections of a voice. ‘Why wasn’t he here to-day?’ was the next thing she said.