The door opening at last, Ella flashed round from the window – was it the door, or her fancy only? For now all seemed still again, no, yes – the handle was moving a very little – truth to tell, Madelene holding the outside knob, was making a last effort to screw up her courage so as to meet her young sister affectionately but with all her wits about her nevertheless.

There was no drawing back now that she had begun to turn the handle, and with a sigh which Ella could not hear, Miss St Quentin came in. Ella gasped slightly – “how beautiful,” was her first thought, to be however instantly followed by a second, “but how cold, and how horribly stuck-up! No, I feel it already – I shall never like her.”

But Madelene, pale and calm, was advancing across the room.

“Ella?” she said, as if till that moment she had had some lingering doubt on the matter, “Ella – it is really you! What a surprise – no, I would not have known you again in the least. Tell me, there is nothing wrong? Nothing the matter with your aunt, I hope?”

She had stooped to kiss the young girl as she spoke. It would be untrue to say that the kiss was a very affectionate one, but on the other hand there was no intentional coldness about it. But Ella was not of this opinion.

“No, thank you,” she replied, after submitting to, though not in any wise returning, the sisterly embrace. “Aunt Phillis is quite well – at this moment she must be, I am afraid, rather upset, for she will have got my telegram. I sent her one from Weevilscoombe station when I arrived.”

“And why should that upset her?” asked Madelene; “she asked you to telegraph your safe arrival, I suppose? But you didn’t travel alone?”

“Yes, indeed I did,” said Ella with a slight laugh. It was a nervous laugh in reality, but to her sister it sounded hard and a little defiant. “I not only travelled alone, but I came off without any one knowing. In fact auntie would only know that I had left her for good, when she got my telegram.”

Miss St Quentin’s pale face flushed a little, then the momentary colour faded, leaving her paler than before. She sat down, and motioned to her sister to do the same.

“I am very sorry, very, very sorry to hear this,” she said, nerving herself to speak. “Ella, I am afraid you have done very wrong, and foolishly. It is not using Mrs Robertson well after all her care of you – replacing a mother to you and giving you a home all these years. And – it is not a good beginning of your future life with us, to have done what we – what papa cannot approve of.”

Ella half rose from the chair on which she had only that moment seated herself. Her eyes sparkled ominously, her face flushed too, but after a different fashion from Madelene’s.

“I don’t know anything about your not approving, and as for papa – well at least he can tell me himself what he thinks. But as for Aunt Phillis – I am sorry if I have grieved her. I would not have done so if I could have helped it, but I don’t see that I could. It isn’t my fault that she is going to marry a vulgar, purse-proud old snob, who had already begun to cast up to me, yes, actually to cast up to me, the daughter of Colonel St Quentin of Coombesthorpe, what his wife-to-be had done for me and spent on me as if I were a charity-child! And that touches on the point of the whole. I am grateful to poor auntie for all her love and care,” and here the young, excited voice quivered a little, “but I don’t see that I need to be grateful to her for what you may call substantial things – she didn’t need to give me a home, as you say, or to spend her money on me – and a good deal of what was spent was my own money, or at least papa’s, which is the same thing; she has told me so herself. I had my own home, just as you and Ermine have – I am papa’s daughter just as much as you two are, even though we hadn’t the same mother. Do you think now – in the name of common-sense – do you see that I should be grateful for being taken away from my own proper home, such a home as this– for no reason at all that I can see except that auntie herself wished it.”

Madelene’s face looked unspeakably pained.

“It was your own mother’s wish,” she said, in a low voice.

“So I have been told – but – do you think dead people’s wishes should be allowed to affect the welfare of the living to such an extent?” asked the child in her sharp downright fashion. “For I don’t. Still that’s not the point – it was done and we’ll take it for granted it was done for the best. But now it was coming to an end – old Burton wasn’t going to have any trouble about me – he’s never been asked and never will be to spend a penny upon me, except once when he paid a fly for me and quarrelled with the driver, and on my last birthday when he gave me a very shabby prayer-book – sham ivory backs, you know, the kind that splits off – and it was auntie’s own doing, so I don’t see that I could have been expected to put up with his rudeness.”

“Had you done anything to irritate him?” asked Madelene.

Ella opened her eyes in surprise.

“Oh dear, yes,” she said, “heaps of things. I don’t suppose I ever did anything but irritate him. My very existence, at least my presence, in auntie’s household irritated him. I understand it all now,” she went on, speaking more and more naturally with the interest of the subject. “Don’t you see he didn’t know anything about us when he first made auntie’s acquaintance and began to think she’d just suit him for a wife, and he thought I was a homeless orphan, a poor dependent, and that he’d have to take me too. It was rather irritating, I’ll allow,” she continued, smiling to herself a little, “for he saw we’d never get on, and if he’d only been a little nicer when he found I wasn’t in his way, after all, we might have ‘parted friendly,’ as servants say. But he was thoroughly put out by me – I couldn’t help trying to annoy him. And last night it came to a sort of crisis – he said I was impertinent and other things he had no business to say to papa’s daughter, who is no relation of his, and at last he told auntie, poor auntie, that she must choose between him and me.”

“And what did Mrs Robertson say?” asked Madelene.

“She didn’t say much. Indeed I didn’t give her any opportunity. She had a headache this morning, no wonder, and didn’t come down. So I just packed up a few things and told the servants to say I’d gone out, and I went to the railway and – came off here. Naturally I came here,” she repeated, her tone acquiring again a shade of defiance, in reality the veil of some unacknowledged misgiving.

Madelene did not at once reply. She sat there, her eyes gazing out of the window before her, in what Ella thought a very aggravating way.

“Do you not agree with me?” the younger sister asked after a moment’s silence. Shyness was unknown to Ella, as were hesitation and patience when she was much concerned about anything.

Madelene turned round and looked at her.

“She’s angry,” thought Ella. “It is not any other feeling that makes her look like that.” And she kept her own bright eyes fixed upon her sister, which did not add to Miss St Quentin’s composure.

“Of course if you were obliged to go anywhere in this – this strange sort of way, you did right to come here,” said Madelene quietly. “But that is not the question at all. Were you right to leave your aunt’s house as you have done? That is the thing.”

“Yes,” said Ella coolly, “under the circumstances I think I was quite right.”

“Without consulting papa, without talking it over with Mrs Robertson, without – without,” Miss St Quentin went on, a sudden sensation of something very like temper nerving her to say it – “without in the least considering our – Ermine’s and my – convenience?”

Ella gazed at her in unfeigned surprise, for a moment or two she was too astonished to feel indignant.

“I don’t understand you,” she said. “Is it usual for sisters to be upon such terms? Is a daughter expected to beg and apologise like a stranger, before getting leave to come home – home where she has a right to be, and from which she was banished without her wishes being consulted in the least?”

“You were a baby,” said Madelene. “You could not have been consulted. And – well the thing was done and this has not been your home, and it is no use talking in that exaggerated, theatrical sort of way, Ella. I shall do my best, my very best,” and here there was a little tremor in her voice, “to make you happy and content with us, and so I know will Ermine, but I can’t say that in what you have done to-day I think you have acted wisely, or – or rightly. What papa will say about it I don’t know. I – I did not mean to put forward any inconvenience to myself, or ourselves, in any prominent way.”

She had already regretted the allusion to her sister and herself that she had made. It was, she felt, both unwise and inconsistent with the resolution she had come to.

Ella did not answer.

“Will you come out for a little?” Madelene went on. “We have been having tea – Ermine and I and – and our cousin – on the lawn. You would like a cup of tea, would you not? I am afraid your room will not be ready yet. We have been making some changes, and the rooms we intend for you are to be papered and painted next week. In the meantime we must consider how best to arrange.”

“I am sorry to give you so much trouble,” said Ella coldly. “I should have thought – it surely cannot be difficult for the third daughter to have a room just as you and Ermine have. But of course you are right – I am a stranger, and it is no good pretending I am not.”

“That was not what I meant at all,” said Madelene. But again Ella made no reply.

“I must take care what I say,” she was thinking to herself, “or I shall be called ‘exaggerated’ and ‘theatrical,’ again.”

Madelene opened the window and stepped out. “Shall we go this way?” she said. “It is nearer than round by the front door.”

Ella followed her.

“I am to be a younger sister when it comes to questions of precedence and that kind of thing, it appears,” she thought. “But a stranger when it suits the rest of the family to consider me so.”

There was something soothing however to her impressionable feelings in the beauty all around her; it was a really exquisite evening and the girl was quick to respond to all such influences.

“How lovely!” she said impulsively.

Madelene turned. There was a smile on her face, almost the first Ella had seen there; the quiet, somewhat impassive countenance seemed transfigured.

“Yes,” she said, “it is lovely. I am glad for you to see it again for the first time on a day like this, though to us, and I think you will agree with us when you have lived here long enough, Coombesthorpe has a charm of its own in every season.”

Ella opened her lips to reply, but before she had time to do so, she caught sight of a figure hastening towards them over the lawn.

“Oh,” said Madelene, “here is Ermine. Yes! Ermie,” she called out, before the new-comer was quite close to them, “it is she – it is really Ella.”