"Dear me, Melicent, how persistent you are!" interrupted Clara impatiently. "One would think there was no need of borrowing trouble."
The elder sister gazed with an air of superiority at the younger. "I was speaking to papa," she remarked with dignity.
The father frowned, the mother raised a deprecating hand, and the imminent retort was hushed. Clara went to her brother, and, leaning on his arm, whispered that, if Mel were not her own sister, she should really get to dislike her.
"How silent you are, Owen," said Hester, looking around at him. "All you have done to entertain us so far has been to make faces when you were sick. To be sure, that made us laugh."
"A sea-sick person may be the cause of wit in others, but is seldom himself witty," was the laconic reply.
The speaker was a slim, elegant youth, with golden tints in his light hair, with rather drooping and very bright blue eyes, and a beautiful, sensuous mouth.
Edith Yorke watched this party with interest, and the longer she looked at the elder gentleman the better she liked him. His manner of addressing the ladies suited her inborn sense of what a gentleman's manner should be. There was no contemptuous waiting before answering them, no flinging the reply over his shoulder, nor growling it out like a bear. Besides, she half-believed—only half, for her eyes were heavy with weeping and loss of sleep—that he had looked kindly at her. Once she was sure that he spoke of her to his wife, but she did not know what he said. It was this: "My dear, do you observe that child? She has an uncommon face."
The lady glanced across the room and nodded. She was too much preoccupied to think of anything but their own affairs. But her husband, on whom these affairs had the contrary effect of driving him to seek distraction, approached Edith.
"Little girl," he said, "you remind me so much of some one I have seen that I would like to know your name, if you please to tell it."
"My name is Edith Eugénie Yorke," she replied, with perfect self-possession.