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ON THE WINGS OF FATE

BY

EFFIE ADELAIDE ROWLANDS

AUTHOR OF

“Love’s Cruel Whim,” “One Man’s Evil,” “Woman Against Woman,” “Little Kit,” “With Heart So True,” etc.

NEW YORK
STREET & SMITH, Publishers

Copyright, 1904
By STREET & SMITH

On the Wings of Fate

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The Nick Carter stories in the New Magnet Library.

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The Horatio Alger stories in the Medal and New Medal Libraries.

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STREET & SMITH, Publishers
NEW YORK

ON THE WINGS OF FATE.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I.
“’TWAS ON A MONDAY MORNING.”

Fractiousness was the keynote of the mental atmosphere in a certain substantial-looking South Kensington house on a certain Monday morning. Not that this bad-tempered atmosphere was peculiar to this one particular Monday by no means. As a rule, every living thing in the house, from the master down to the blind and asthmatic pug that lived under the kitchen table, started the working week in a mood that was detestable in an individual as well as collective sense.

And perhaps the worst offender of the lot was Mrs. Pennington.

Her hatred of Mondays had become traditional.

Seated at her well-worn writing table, surrounded by tradesmen’s books of every size, color and description, she was simply unapproachable.

On ordinary occasions gentle-voiced and sympathetic, the advent of Monday saw her transformed into a flushed, querulous, pugilistic person, whose whole attitude denoted war and hatred toward every washerwoman, every butcher, baker or greengrocer that ever had existed or ever would exist. Life in the Kensington household for at least three hours of the average Monday might be likened to the sensation of a train that had suddenly left the rails and was bumping along with a series of shocks, till either the steam was turned off in time or a catastrophe occurred.

That a catastrophe never had occurred is one of those everyday marvels with which we are hemmed about. Why, for instance, “cook”—a generic term which covered a multitude of persons—had never turned on her mistress and thrashed out the end of the “suet question” with fists instead of angry impertinence, was one of those problems which Polly, at least, had never been able to solve.

“You know,” she had said on more than one occasion to Winifred, up in the seclusion of their bedroom, “you know it would take so little to smash mother; she makes a lot of noise when she is cross, but she is such a small thing, anybody could bowl her over in a minute, and there would be an end of the argument!”

“I don’t think you ought to talk like that about mother,” Winifred said on one of these occasions. As a matter of fact, it happened to be the same Monday morning alluded to in the very commencement of this story.

Polly, who was making out her washing list, writing the items down with savage dabs to get some response from a pencil with a broken lead, asked in a curt sort of way:

“Why not?”

“It is not respectful,” Winifred explained.

“Then,” said Polly, looking up with a defiant, not to say joyous, gleam in her eyes, “it is the one thing that I shall continue to say! I must have a vent somewhere!” she finished, as she returned to the washing list and the impotent pencil.

After a moment of silent reproach from Winifred, Polly broke forth into speech again.

“Oh, how I hate Mondays! How I loathe Mondays! How I wish one could skip every Monday that ever comes!”

“Tuesdays would be just the same,” said Winifred, with her superior smile.

“There ought to be no beginning to the week at all. What good does it serve? Why can’t we run straight along in one unbroken line, I should like to know? There must be something vicious about a Monday. Look what a bad effect it has on all of us.”

It was now Winifred’s turn.

“I do wish, Polly,” she said, sharply, “that you would come and do your share of the room instead of talking such a lot of rubbish!”

Polly subsided.

“I am coming,” she said, in her meekest way; and after pinning the washing list to the compact brown holland bundle, she put it outside the door, and forthwith equipped herself with duster and feather brush, and set to work to make her corner of the large room as neat as Winifred’s.

This was not altogether feasible, since Winifred’s idea of neatness and hers did not quite coincide. For instance, every Monday, for the last year, at least, Polly had registered a vow that she would set herself the task of mending the old rug by her bedside before another week came round, but the days slipped by somehow, and the rug’s shabbiness became more and more enforced; it was, in fact, as shabby as it could be. Polly gazed at it this morning with a touch of shame.

“I think I will do it now. I can darn it with some of that crewel wool, and I shall at least preserve my neck, if not the original pattern.”

With Polly, sudden suggestions meant operations. She sat down on the floor cross-legged, and pulled the once valuable rug on her knees.

“I shall ask father to give me a new one for my Christmas present,” Polly observed, as she sorted out the nearest shade in her wools to cover over the jagged hole.

Winifred rubbed at her few silver ornaments a moment or two in silence.

“If I were you, I don’t think I would say much about a Christmas present this year,” she observed, after a little while, as she made the top of her old salts bottle gleam like a mirror beneath her industrious leather.

Polly looked up.

When Polly looked upward with her strange gray-green eyes she had the most bewitching air in the world.

“Why not?” she queried, promptly. “We always do have a present at Christmas.”

“This Christmas,” Winifred remarked, sententiously, “will not be like other Christmases.”

Polly frowned and threaded her needle.

“Don’t be mysterious, for goodness sake!” she cried; “you do so love putting on creepy, crawly sort of ways, Winnie.”

Winifred set all her little treasures in their proper places; everything looked spotless and at its best.

“Father has lost a lot of money this year. I heard mother and Aunt Nellie talking together the other afternoon, and I found out then the meaning of lots of things that have puzzled us lately. We are living beyond our income,” Winifred said, rather grandly—she said it as if she were making a notable statement. “We only stay on here because father has a long lease of the house, and we should have to pay the rent whether we lived here or not. Besides, mother told Christina that she hoped things would mend in the next year, and she doesn’t want to make any big change till Chrissie is married.”

Polly darned on laboriously.

The rug was dusty and the floor was hard, and something, she did not know what, seemed to be pressing very tightly on her heart. She was sorry, in a vague sort of way, that she should have been so cross, and that she should have desired her father to give her a Christmas present.

She was not very old or learned as yet, but she had a very deep font of sympathy in her fresh young heart, and Winifred’s clear, matter-of-fact statement seemed to make a claim upon that sympathy for some reason or other.

She recalled her father’s face as he had kissed them good-by that morning, before rushing off to the city, after a hurried breakfast, and what she had called “Monday grumps,” took another form now.

“You mustn’t tell Chrissie that I heard anything, Polly,” Winifred said, suddenly. “Mother told Aunt Nellie she particularly did not want Chrissie to be worried.”

“I’m not a sneak,” was Polly’s retort.

She was thinking little things over in her mind. There had been a great difference of late in her home, things had been wanted very badly, and had remained wanting. Two or three of the maids had been sent away. The lessons she and Winifred had been taking with fashionable masters had ceased in the autumn, and though more studies were spoken of, they were not begun yet.

Oh, yes, there had been many changes in the current of their life this past year. The only thing that had remained unchanged, Polly determined, had been the characteristics of the detestable Monday mornings with the dusting, and arranging and the elements of anger and dissatisfaction throughout the house.

And for this fact, Polly in her thinking, felt as if she had lighted on a truth, too.

Who knew how much care and real trouble had lain closed up in those tradesmen’s books for her poor little mother! trouble that had to be faced and met each Monday morning? How could she tell now, with Winifred’s neat little story of their poverty ringing in her ears, what a weight of anxiety might not have underlain those wordy arguments her mother had fought out with a succession of cooks?

Polly darned her rug slowly, while Winifred having finished her tasks sat down in her own prim fashion in her own prim armchair and continued her discourse.

“I think, too, that father has had to pay a lot of money for Harold this year. I must say I have always thought it silly of father to send Harold abroad. Boys always do get money spent on them so freely.”

There was a decided touch of prettiness about Winifred Pennington as she sat with her small, white hands—Winifred wore gloves to save her hands on all occasions—folded demurely together on her lap, and her wealth of hair—maybe of a tone that was a trifle colorless—arranged about her little head in countless plaits, a custom that is out of fashion nowadays, yet that suited her. Winifred’s eyes were gray, like Polly’s, but how unlike! and her features were as regular as her natural instincts.

“Harold is a duck,” Polly interposed, warmly.

“He is the kind of duck that costs!” was Winifred’s quiet rejoinder. She gave a little sigh that had something of impatience in it. “Chrissie will have a good time this year, at any rate.”

Polly drew the last thread of her darning together with a little jerk, and spread the rug on the floor.

“I wish I knew something more about this man she is going to marry! Just fancy, Winnie, we none of us have seen him yet, and Chrissie is to be his wife in a few months. It doesn’t seem quite right somehow.”

Winifred’s eyebrows went up a little.

“I don’t think it matters very much our not having seen him. All that does matter is, that he is Sir Mark Wentworth, and that Chrissie will be very rich and very happy.”

Polly stood up and surveyed her workmanship.

She was not the best darner in the world, and the rug had rather a drawn-up look where the yawning rent had been, nevertheless Polly gazed at it complacently—it was a feat to have accomplished it at all. Then she shook off the bits of thread from her gown and went to work to finish up her corner.

It aggravated her to see Winifred sitting there so calmly, and the row of little gleaming silver things irritated her still more.

Polly had her own share of such ornaments. A photograph frame that held her mother’s picture, a queer small spoon some one had given her on her last birthday, a piece of old Dutch silver, fashioned to hold holy water and a broad silver belt buckle, all of which were carefully displayed on her little shelf, but all of which were just as black and tarnished as Winifred’s possessions were brilliant and clean.

She had her row of family portraits, too, which were very dear to her. She was wicked enough to confess to herself she was far fonder of Winifred’s picture than she was of Winifred herself.

“That is because I have to live with her, I suppose, and because she does make such a fuss about being clean and tidy. I like dust, plenty of it—nice, thick, black, London dust!” she now and then said, pugnaciously, to herself.

Mrs. Pennington had never trained her girls to be accustomed to the luxury of a maid. She was old-fashioned in her educational theories, and considered a certain amount of housework absolutely necessary for the welfare of her daughters. Hence every morning, Polly and Winifred had to make their own beds, and dust their room, and every Monday they were expected to turn it out thoroughly, and make it as clean as a new pin.

Downstairs in the drawing room Christina had to dust all the china, and to keep the many valuable ornaments in good order, and once a week each girl was sent down for an hour’s study with cook.

The mother, like an industrious bee, hovered over all the arrangements of her house, and her hand was always ready to make a rough corner smooth.

On this particular morning even her clever, deft hands found the rough corner a little too rough to be manipulated.

The usual scenes in the study, the usual fights over the household books had ended, but the trouble was not finished with them. Christina, when she went to seek her mother at the customary hour, found her sitting very still in her chair, her pale, worn, interesting face supported by her hand, which overshadowed her eyes, but could not hide from her daughter the fact that she had been crying.

“Mother, why would you not let me do the books for you? You worry yourself far too much.” Chrissie’s voice was very like Winifred’s—even, musical, rather cold, and there was a strong resemblance between them.

The elder girl was, however, far more attractive; in fact, when Polly declared her eldest sister to be beautiful, she was not far wrong, for beautiful Christina Pennington was, in a delicate, classical way. Her features were almost perfect, her eyes of a wonderful shade of dark-blue, she had the rarest skin, and her figure, though very slight, was well proportioned.

Mrs. Pennington roused herself hurriedly as her daughter spoke.

“I am all right now, Chrissie, dear. I made myself very angry with cook; but she is really too impertinent. I—I am afraid she will have to go.” Mrs. Pennington said this half nervously.

“I wanted you to send her away long ago, dear,” Christina said, quietly; “and if she has been rude to you to-day, I think she ought to go at once.”

Mrs. Pennington colored painfully.

“I will give her proper notice next week,” was her answer. She moved the papers nervously on her desk; there was something most pathetic in the look of her small, thin fingers. “Are you going out, my darling?” she asked, looking up hurriedly.

“I came to know if you would come with me, mother? I heard from Sunstead this morning. Mark wants me to go to his grandmother for Christmas, and I must get at least two new frocks—one for evening, and the other for everyday wear.”

“Shall you go to Celeste as usual?” Mrs. Pennington asked. She made a big endeavor to speak lightly, but any person of keen perception would have read the heaviness, the perplexity that lay in her voice.

Christina paused.

“I think so. She cuts so well, and she is not more expensive than anyone else. Grannie’s check came to me this morning, happily, and it will just see me comfortably through this visit. I am sorry to leave you, mother, dear, but I suppose I must go, must I not?”

When Christina put a little pleading into her sweetly toned voice she was quite irresistible, to her mother at least.

“Oh, my dear, of course you must go. It is only right and proper that you should be at Sunstead as often as possible, since it is to be your future home. We—we shall miss you, that you know only too well,” Mrs. Pennington said, with a faint smile breaking the troubled look on her face, “but we must not be selfish.”

Christina kissed her mother in a pathetic little way.

“Do come out, dear,” she said. “The air will do you good, and I want your advice with Celeste. No one has such taste as you.”

Mrs. Pennington held her beautiful daughter in her arms a long moment, and then broke into words and laughter as she hurried from the room.

“We have just an hour and a half before luncheon. Are the girls coming too, Chrissie?”

Chrissie shook her head.

“Winnie must practice, and it is Polly’s day to attend to the plants in the conservatory,” she said, very precisely. She exercised a certain control over her sisters.

She moved upstairs gracefully to her own room, and Mrs. Pennington followed more slowly.

Each step she took seemed to be weighed as with lead, and once she stopped and pressed both her hands on her heart before she could go on.

Polly, who had finished cleaning her silver, was on her way to the conservatory—already Winifred’s clear, neat scales were running up and down the piano with the perfection of an automaton—when she met her mother at the top of the stairs.

To pop down the watering can and fold her mother in her arms was the work of an instant.

“You duck!” she said, kissing the small, dear, worn face, “do you know how much I love you? Have you the least idea how sweet you are, you lamb and dove?”

Mrs. Pennington nestled almost like a child in those clinging young arms.

“Polly, you have no respect for me,” she said, and although she spoke in her usual tone, Polly detected a difference. It was perhaps due to the train of thought that Winifred’s chance words had awakened in the girl’s mind that she heard that faint difference in her mother’s voice.

“Mums!” she said, wistfully, “may I come and help you dress? You are going out, I know.”

“I can manage by myself, Polly, and you have a lot of work to do in the conservatory, my pet. Chrissie and I are going to her dressmaker; she has to have some new frocks, as she is going to spend Christmas with Sir Mark and his mother.”

Polly gave vent to a deep exclamation of disappointment.

“Oh! mother,” she said, “I thought Chrissie would be sure to be with us this Christmas; it is the last she will spend with us in a proper way,” she finished, quaintly.

She would have said more, but something urged her not to press the matter to-day.

She picked up her watering can and went slowly to the conservatory.

Winifred had left her scales for her exercises, and Polly stopped to listen. She and Winifred played the same exercises, but Polly played them differently.

“Why do people grow up and get married?” she asked herself. “Chrissie belongs to us and yet that nasty Mark Wentworth comes and steals her away. I hate him! I think he might have let her be with us for Christmas. I am sure dear little mother feels it awfully, but she is such a sweet thing she never complains. She looks very tired to-day,” Polly mused on, as she drew a very large pair of gardening gloves over her hands and prepared to do her duty among the plants.

The conservatory, like everything else in the house, had a shabby and rather dull appearance. Fresh plants were wanted and some of the windows were cracked.

“I wonder if what Winnie told me just now is true; if we are going to be very poor?” Polly said to herself.

She looked about her to-day with new eyes, and a certain seriousness stole into her brown, mischievous face.

She was quite a contrast to her sisters, both of whom resembled their mother. Polly, on the other hand, was neither like her father nor her mother. When this was remarked upon she got very angry.

“I hark back,” she would observe. “Goodness knows who I am like. I don’t think it matters much; looks are not everything, are they?”

For silly little Polly imagined that because she inherited neither her father’s good looks, nor her mother’s once undoubted beauty, she must perforce be exceedingly plain. She was, on the contrary, exceedingly pretty, a fact that was making itself patent to more than one person by slow degrees.

She was a very young girl, a real old-fashioned young lady, with her head crammed with romantic ideas and any amount of illusions.

She loved sweets and spent all her modest pocket money on chocolate caramels and Turkish delight. Her age was seventeen and a half, and she looked at least two years younger than that, very unlike Winifred, whose nineteen summers might easily have passed for twenty-five.

Polly’s hair was, again, a contrast to her sisters’. Winifred had masses of soft dun-colored hair, Christina a wealth of warm brown tresses. Polly’s hair was uncompromisingly dark, hair that was never very tidy, but never needed tongs or curling paper, since it had a trick of framing itself about her small head in a most seductively caressing manner.

She called her nose a disgrace to her family. It was a nondescript nose, not quite straight, with a wonderful amount of humor in the cut of the nostrils. It would have been impossible to imagine any other nose to match with those queer, lovely eyes of hers, eyes which had the strangest and quickest gradations of color in them, and which, like their prototype, the sea, could in an instant flash green and then grow wonderfully blue.

“Cat’s eyes,” Winnie called them, but they had nothing feline, or cunning, or shifty in their expression. They were too clear, too joyous, too full of life and the gladness of life, to have any of the subtlety, the blind sort of beauty one sees in a cat.

From the conservatory Polly had a good view of all that came and went on the stairs, and an hour or so after her mother, looking wan and shadowy but still attractive, followed by Chrissie, a vision of smartness and beauty, had passed down the stairs, Polly became aware that Jane, the parlormaid, was having an altercation with somebody at the front door.

Polly’s pulses beat a little nervously. She was beginning to know the significance of troublesome callers by degrees, and she turned with a start as Jane, evidently flushed and beaten, came running up the stairs.

“There’s a gentleman, Miss Polly, what’s asking for master or mistress, and he won’t be said nay. I have told him they ain’t neither of them at home, but he won’t believe me, and he won’t go away.”

Polly hesitated a moment. Her heart was beating very quickly, she did not know why, and she felt a little frightened. But she saw something had to be done. She drew off her gloves and her big apron.

“Show the gentleman into the dining room. I will come and speak to him, Jane.”

Giving her gown a tweak, and her hair two or three futile pats, Polly went slowly down the stairs.

She was not sure if she were doing right or wrong, but most certainly, if the man would not go away at Jane’s desire, then he must go away at her command.

Jane met her at the foot of the stairs.

“He’s in the dining room, miss,” she said, still hot and angry.

Polly walked in her stateliest way into the dining room.

A young man, tall, and of a very big build, was standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire. He was frowning darkly, and was evidently in a very bad temper.

“Looks as if he had been born in a hurry on a Monday!” was impertinent Polly’s quick summing up to herself.

She shut the door with a click and advanced into the room.

The young man, who had been regarding his boots, now lifted his eyes and regarded her, and for the space of two or three seconds his exceedingly angry eyes gazed into the girl’s defiant ones while silence reigned.

And thus it was that Valentine Ambleton met pretty Polly Pennington for the first time.

CHAPTER II.
THE FIRST MEETING.

It was the man who spoke first.

“I asked to see Mr. or Mrs. Pennington,” he said, curtly.

“And you have been told,” Polly answered, “that you can see neither, since neither are here to be seen.”

“Your servant was most impertinent,” the man said, sharply; “her manner was so misleading I insisted on being admitted.”

“Yes,” said Polly, calmly; “I heard you, and I consider you were very rude.”

A faint smile flickered across the man’s face for the space of an instant.

“May I ask to whom I have the honor of speaking?” he said, with a touch of amused courtesy.

“I am Polly—I mean Mary—Pennington,” the girl drew herself up to her full height, “and may I ask who you are?” she queried, in her own peculiarly frank manner.

“My name is Valentine Ambleton. I am a cousin of Mark Wentworth.”

Polly’s expression changed.

“Oh,” she said, a little frightened now at her temerity. “Oh! won’t you sit down, Mr. Ambleton? My father is at business in the city, but my mother will be back directly. I expect her every minute; she has gone out with my eldest sister.”

“Miss Christina Pennington?” queried Mr. Ambleton, with a strange tone in his voice as he spoke Chrissie’s name.

Polly nodded her head.

“Won’t you sit down?” she asked, more and more impressed that she had not received him very graciously. “Or perhaps you had better come into the drawing room. Chris—I mean mother—may be vexed to know you are here.”

The mere fact of his announced connection with Sir Mark Wentworth made Polly feel it incumbent upon her to show him a great deal of attention. The air of mystery and grandeur with which the name of Mark Wentworth was guarded by Christina warranted this. Indeed she trembled a little as she imagined all Chrissie would say when this interview was faithfully repeated.

“I will stay here, thank you,” Mr. Ambleton answered her, not very amiably. He stood in the same place with his back to the fireplace, and Polly looked at him a little hopelessly.

He was so big, and strong, and he looked so cross. It was a strange thought to come, but she did hope he was not going to worry her little mother. Her heart sank at his demeanor.

“I will get you a newspaper,” she was beginning again, nervously, when the door opened and Chrissie and her mother appeared.

Polly effected an introduction with pretty awkwardness.

“This is Mr. Valentine Ambleton, mother darling. He is a cousin of Sir Mark Wentworth’s, and he wishes to see you very particularly.”

“I will not detain you more than a few moments,” Ambleton broke in curtly, as he glanced half compassionately at Mrs. Pennington, and then turned his eyes in a scathing sort of fashion upon Christina. “I would offer you an apology for coming, only that I consider the circumstances of the case warrant my being here. I may as well state that I have a kind of responsibility in connection with my Cousin Mark, and on this ground I am here to-day to protest against this marriage with your daughter. Stay, hear me out,” the young man continued, half sternly, as Mrs. Pennington uttered a faint exclamation, “for your daughter I can have no feeling of antagonism, since she is a stranger to me; but as a woman whose life may be utterly marred, I have felt it my duty to put plain facts before her and her parents. My cousin, Mark Wentworth, is no fit husband for any young girl, since apart from other and most potent objections, he is a man whose tendencies under the influence of drink are dangerous in the fullest sense of the word. Had I been in England this summer I would have taken proper precautions to prevent Miss Pennington from standing in the position she occupies to-day.”

Polly had turned to leave the room when he had first commenced to speak, but his words held her rooted to the spot, and now she had moved back to her mother’s side and had slipped her hand into Mrs. Pennington’s cold one.

Never had she seen her mother’s face wear such a look as was written on it now.

It was Christina who answered him.

She was very pale, more like a white statue than a living woman, and her voice had a tone in it that Polly had never heard from her lips before.

“We thank you, Mr. Ambleton, my parents and I, for your wonderful kindness in burdening yourself with such a disagreeable duty, and, having thanked you, we have no more to say.”

Valentine Ambleton looked at her, and his lips curled.

“I see,” he said, in a low, quick tone, “I have made a mistake.”

“You have done more than made a mistake,” Christina Pennington said, coldly; “you have been guilty of intrusion, and unpardonable rudeness. I think the matter may rest there.”

He bent his head and moved away, but the mother, who had been a stunned listener to this conversation, suddenly realized all it meant.

“You must not go. You—you have given me a great shock. My husband and I—Polly, dear, run away—why are you here? This must not rest at such a point,” Mrs. Pennington said, conquering her agitation with dignity, “we must investigate the matter.”

Then a revelation was wrought in poor little Polly’s knowledge of her best loved sister’s nature.

Christina suddenly flashed crimson.

“There shall be no investigation,” she said, in a choked, angry voice, “I am Mark Wentworth’s promised wife, and I shall marry him whatever his cousin may say against him. I have known of your mischief-making propensities, and I have been warned against you,” she said passionately, looking directly into the man’s eyes. “It is well understood by now how jealous you are of Mark’s position, and how you hate him—how you have always hated him. It was a clever trick to come here and try to work harm with me, but you have failed, Mr. Ambleton, you have failed absolutely. My parents have no power to urge or control me. I am twenty-four years of age, and permit no one to interfere in my life. My word is pledged to Mark Wentworth, and I shall be his wife.”

Valentine Ambleton heard these bitter words to the end. Polly, obeying her mother, had crept toward the door, but Chrissie had spoken so quickly, all was said before the girl could pass out.

She paused with fast beating heart to look back at the little scene, at her mother’s anguished face and Chrissie’s hard, stony one, and as her sister ceased speaking, she saw a wave of pity mingle with the contempt expressed on Valentine Ambleton’s face, and his earnestly spoken, low-voiced response caught her ears.

“Then may God help you!” he said, and Polly paused no more, but shut the door after her, and ran hurriedly up the stairs to her own room.

She caught the sound of the big hall door close with a sharp bang as she reached the corner that was her only place of retreat.

She realized, as she sat down in a chair, that her heart was beating painfully, and that her limbs seemed suddenly feeble and useless.

Christina’s voice, Christina’s words, and her mother’s white, hopeless misery kept a tragedy alive in her heart.

She felt as if some cruel thing had come suddenly upon her, cutting her apart forever from the old sunny life of her childhood. For Polly had looked on a truth, she had seen into her dearly loved sister’s heart, and she had recoiled in her young innocence from the story she saw written there. How often, oh! how often only this very morning she had stood her ground manfully, and fought Winifred’s cold, quiet attacks on Chrissie’s nature.

“You think her an angel,” Winifred had said, barely two hours before. “Well, think it if you like, but I cannot be expected to be so silly. Chrissie is just as selfish as she is pretty. Do you know that she had fifty pounds this morning from Grandmother Pennington, and do you suppose she will offer to share one of those fifty pounds with us?” Winifred had laughed quietly. “She will put it away in a box or spend it on her own back. Oh! Chrissie is no angel, I can tell you!”

“She is my darling sister, and I love her,” had been Polly’s only argument. “I don’t know anything about any fifty pounds, but I do know that if Chrissie ever dreams we want anything she will give it to us at once.”

“Will she?” queried Winifred, as she had risen to go down to her practicing. “If Chrissie ever has a farthing she can call her own, she will keep it for herself, you see if she doesn’t.”

Polly had retorted with some hot word of reproach and loyalty mingled, and then she had gone down to her task of cutting the dead leaves and watering the plants, and she had quickly dismissed Winifred’s words as being only a part of that jealousy toward Chrissie that was made a little more patent to Polly each day.

But Winifred’s curt, sharp definition of her elder sister came back to poor little Polly in this moment of startled pain and self-communion; a veil seemed to slip from her eyes, and she saw Chrissie as she had never seen her before. Her indignation against the man who had brought such a sudden change in the atmosphere of her home would have been very deep had she not had ringing in her ears those few last words he had spoken, that sentence fraught with a pity too deep to be expressed.

The entrance of Winifred, her usually calm manner quite moved and excited, called Polly back from her thoughts.

“We are to go down to luncheon by ourselves,” Winnie said. “Mother is ill, and Chrissie has gone out, and Jane says some one came, and there has been some sort of a scene. I want to know all about it.”

Polly brushed her hair savagely.

“I am so hungry I could eat a bear!” she said, and so saying she pushed past Winifred and ran out of the room. Not from her lips should anyone hear aught that was hurtful to one who had been so dear to her, and was still so dear. That was the keynote of Polly’s nature—love and loyalty; a clinging faith which not even proof could well upset.

Valentine Ambleton drove directly to a railway station on leaving the Penningtons’ house. His sister was waiting for him; she was very like him—tall, handsome, frank-looking. She wore a well-cut traveling gown, and had two dogs beside her, carefully held by a strap.

“You are a little late, dear,” she said, but she smiled as she said it.

Valentine busied himself by getting her and the dogs and the luggage into the train before he explained what had detained him.

When they were seated in the railway carriage he did so.

“I am afraid you will give me a scolding, Grace. I have disobeyed you.”

Grace Ambleton looked at him keenly.

“You have seen Miss Pennington?”

He nodded his head.

“Well, Val?”

“It is not very well, my dear. Miss Pennington beat me off the ground, and made me look what I suppose I was, an intrusive fool. My good intention bore very bad fruit.”

“I am sorry you went,” Grace said, after a little pause. “I know you felt it was your duty, but, after all, I never thought with you on this subject. I was quite sure Miss Pennington knew perfectly well what sort of a man Mark was, and would not be moved by what you had to tell her. You must not forget how rich Mark is, and that he has a title. There are, I fear, many women like this one, who will accept these things, no matter what evils are attached to them. She is pretty, I suppose?”

Valentine was stroking the Irish terrier’s head.

“She is quite beautiful, and I fell in love with the mother, a gentle, worn creature, whose face showed me her heart was of a different construction to her daughter’s; but she had no control. She is a nominal guardian, as I am with Mark. Miss Pennington put forward her independence very clearly.”

“What class of people are they?”

“Of our own class. I heard something of the father from old Bulwer this morning. He is a merchant hovering on the verge of ruin. The house looked poor,” Valentine said. “It made me sorry somehow, and I was more sorry still when I got outside and realized what a miserable thing human nature is. I had difficulty in being admitted at first, and a young girl, a regular little spitfire, entertained me till her mother came. I suppose you will see something of these people in the future, Grace, since we are to be near neighbors of Sunstead. Naturally, if the daughter is to be Lady Wentworth, the family will be on the scene.”

“I don’t think I care to know them,” Grace Ambleton said, frankly.

And after this the subject dropped, and Valentine opened the newspaper, and settled himself in his corner to read.

His thoughts wandered a good deal, however, and the vision of a certain worn woman’s face haunted him.

He had conceived an immediate liking for Mrs. Pennington.

“Poor woman! she has heavy troubles to come, if what I hear is true, and she cannot hope for much love and consolation from her eldest daughter. It is to be hoped the little brown maiden will be more satisfactory. She can hit out straight, anyhow,” he mused to himself, with a faint smile, “and I rather like her for that. She is pretty, too,” he added, as an afterthought, and this thought arose as a very clear remembrance of Polly’s strange, lovely eyes came to his mind.

They remained a memory for a few seconds, and then they faded away, but Polly and her wonderful eyes were destined to be brought back to Valentine Ambleton’s memory before very long.

CHAPTER III.
BACK IN FAMILIAR HAUNTS.

A prettier country could hardly be imagined than that to which Grace Ambleton and her brother were being swiftly conveyed, after a lengthy absence abroad. They occupied, as a residence, a quaint, many-gabled house, that lay, surrounded by its old-fashioned garden, just beyond the cathedral boundaries and within sight of the close, in the old city of Dynechester, and all around and about them were scattered relics of a time dead and gone, covered over with that touch of unmistakable age, half delicate because of its intangibility, yet none the less indisputable.

Old trees stood like sentinels alone. The roof of Grace’s home was moss-decorated, and the tiny streets that led to the residence were narrow and ill-paved; ill-lit, too, Grace’s many girl friends would declare, in the dark winter days, and though there was nothing ghostly or cheerless once the doors of the Dower House were flung wide open, there was some of these friends who declared frankly among themselves that they would rather not live as Grace did in such a queer, many-centuried home, built so close to the cathedral walls and the cathedral burial ground.

Others there were who would most gladly have taken Grace’s place in this quaint old house, some for the sake of Valentine, the elder brother, and some for the sake of the laughing eyes and wonderfully handsome face of Sacha, the youngest of the two Ambleton men.

Grace was perfectly well aware of this divided feeling among her friends, but she was quite indifferent to all.

The Dower House was her home for as long as she chose to stay in it. She knew that, and she told herself on the morning after her return from her sojourn abroad, that she would be in no hurry to leave this home again, either for a temporary or a permanent absence. For Grace loved the house where she had been born, and where all her healthy childhood had been passed; she loved every stick and stone about the place.

There was a touch of welcome to her in the tall, gray, stately walls of Dynechester’s old cathedral, a voice of greeting in the sound of the familiar clock chimes and bells.

“I never want to go away any more,” she confessed to Bob, the Irish terrier, and Nancy, the Ayrshire one, and both animals understood, and were entirely of her opinion.

They had been brought from Dynechester two days before to greet their beloved mistress in London. Val had been detained in town on business, and Grace had remained with him, gratifying her longing for home by summoning one of the servants to come to her with the dogs, which she had been forced to leave behind when she had started for their long tour in foreign countries.

“It is like heaven to be back in the dear old corners,” she told herself more than once, and when she met Val later in the day she made him smile by her ardent delight in, and enthusiasm for, her home.

“Not much good taking you everywhere and showing you the great wonders of the world, Miss Grace!” her brother remarked, with a laugh.

Grace echoed the laugh.

“I never knew how much I loved dear old Dynechester till I saw it again yesterday, Val.”

Valentine glanced affectionately at his sister.

They were an undemonstrative pair, but few people had a deeper, truer love for one another than Val and Grace Ambleton. The girl’s love had other elements in it besides mere sisterly affection and pride. Valentine had been the only parent Grace had known.

It was true she had a shadowy memory of her mother, a woman who had been in constant suffering, and who had leaned upon her eldest boy for protection, but this mother had passed away before Grace had reached five years of age, and such care and thought as the girl had had in the succeeding years she had had from her brother, Valentine.

She was dear to Sacha too, and she loved her second brother devotedly, but Sacha, though her senior by three years, had always fallen into the position of being her baby and care, just as she had been Val’s.

Their mother had been a Wentworth, the only daughter of the old lady who lived a perpetual invalid up at the large house beyond the outskirts of the town.

There had been three sons born to this Lady Wentworth, and of these three two had died in childhood and one had married and had begotten an heir to the title and the estates.

Grace had a very vivid memory of her Uncle Ambrose, father of the present baronet, Sir Mark Wentworth.

She had been very much attached to this uncle, and she had sorrowed deeply at his sudden death. It had surprised no one to learn at the time of that death, that by the will of Sir Ambrose, his nephew, Valentine Ambleton, was appointed a co-trustee with an old legal friend, to Mark Wentworth and his various properties.