"No," said Miss Grey. "I wrote, and nobody answered my letter."
"I am afraid it was regarded as—as——"
"Undutiful perhaps?"
"Well—unfriendly. But Mrs. Saulsbury now fears—or rather knows, for she is too good a woman to fear—that the end is nigh, and she wishes to be in fullest reconciliation with every one."
"Oh, has she sent for me?" Minola said, with something like a cry, all her coldness and formality vanishing with her contempt. "I'll go, Mr. Sheppard—oh, yes, at once! I did not know—I never thought that she was really in any danger."
Poor Minola! With all her wild-bird freedom and her pride in her lonely independence and her love of London, there yet remained in her that instinct of home, that devotion to the principle of family and authority, that she would have done homage at such a moment, and with something like enthusiasm, to even such a simulacrum of the genius of home as she had lately known. Something had passed through her mind that very day as she talked with Heron, and feared she had talked too freely: something that had made her think with vague pain of yearning on the sweetness of a sheltered home. Her heart beat as she thought, "I will go to her—I will go home; I will try to love her."
Mr. Sheppard dispelled her enthusiasm. "Mrs. Saulsbury did not exactly express a wish to see you."
"Oh!"
"In fact, when that was suggested to her—I am sure I need hardly say that I at once suggested it—she thought, and perhaps wisely, that it would be better you should not meet."
Minola drew back, and stood as Mr. Heron had been standing near the chimney-piece. She did not speak.