herself also.

She had no desire to be friendly with Christina, save only so far
as she might have been given ingress to the old, ailing woman up at
Sunstead, who missed, she knew well, the constant visits she had been
wont to pay.

Grace would also have felt happier had she not remembered the quarrel
with Mark.

“Perhaps it will all come right some day,” was what she said to
herself, cheerily.

Had she ever come across her cousin, she would have gone straight up
to him and have chided him in her old, affectionate way, for Mark had
always had a great liking for her, but she never saw her cousin—only
her cousin’s wife.

Christina’s presence so constantly in the streets of Dynechester seemed
to emphasize the separation between Sir Mark and the Ambletons, for she
would flash past in her carriage, in which she sat swathed about in
her furs like an empress, and Grace had to watch and see her go as a
stranger.

With the coming of Christmas, Grace gave herself up, heart and soul, to
her preparations.

“Mark will send us no game this year,” she had remarked once to Val,
who had answered, quietly:

“Expect nothing from Sunstead now, Gracie dear; but the unexpected!”
and Grace had looked at him half wistfully, not quite understanding him.

Valentine did not think it necessary to put trouble into his sister’s
mind before such trouble was inevitable, but he was a man who saw far
into the future, and he felt assured that young Lady Wentworth was not
merely an enemy, but one who would carry her enmity very far.

Happily for Val he was kept hard at work these autumn and early winter
days. There were many times when he was compelled to be absent from
Dynechester for days together, but Grace, though she missed him sorely,
encouraged him in all that concerned his work. She would at least have
him at home for Christmas, and she would be so happy with both her
“children” with her; in fact, it was going to be a happy Christmas
altogether.

“I am afraid they will be rather desolate up at Sunstead, Val,” she
said one morning, just the week preceding the holiday time.

Val was going to London on business, and she walked with him to the
station to see him off. He was to bring Sacha back with him.

“Will they? Why?” asked Val, not thinking very much about the matter.

“Firstly, because poor grannie seems so weak and ailing. You know I
sent Ellen up to the big house yesterday. She has been twice every
week since I could not go myself, and she has made me very sad about
grannie. Val, I must go and see her at Christmas time. Poor, dear, old
grannie, I am sure she misses me very much!”

Val looked troubled, as he always did at all mention of the separation
from Sunstead.

“And then Ellen tells me Lady Wentworth is in mourning for her father,
who died last week, I believe. This must make her sad. Altogether, I
feel sorry for them!”

Val parted from his sister with that regret that they always felt even
at the shortest separation.

“Now, don’t overwork yourself, making plum puddings and roasting
turkeys,” he ordered.

“Oh!” Grace said, with a laugh. “My plum puddings were all made weeks
ago. Take care of yourself, Val, and, remember, don’t come back without
Sacha.”

Valentine was whirled up to London, deep in thought. He was thinking
more on his sister’s account than his own. He must try some means
of settling this stupid business with Mark, if only for their old
grandmother’s sake.

The old Lady Wentworth was, perhaps, of not much count now in the
world, but Grace had always been devoted to her mother’s mother, and
Val resolved he must open some way by which his sister could resume her
ministrations to the crippled old lady. But for this Val felt he would
rather that his sister never came into contact with Christina Wentworth.

“They are so wide apart in every sense, they could never assimilate,”
he said to himself. “Now, if it had been the mother, or even that
bad-tempered, dark-haired little sister, Grace could have got on very
differently.”

His thoughts wandered slightly in the direction of Mrs. Pennington and
the “bad-tempered, dark-haired little sister,” and he found himself
sending them sincere sympathy.

“So the father is dead—poor man! Things were very bad with him, I
fear. I wonder if they are left with any provisions. Now is the time
for Lady Wentworth to exercise some filial and sisterly affection.”

Ambleton smiled to himself a grim smile at this thought. He had not
much opinion of Lady Wentworth, either as a daughter or sister;
and then he got out of the train and walked a little way before he
hailed an omnibus, and got inside, for it was raining, a nasty, fine
rain, and when he was comfortably seated he raised his eyes, and lo!
there, immediately in front of him, was no less a person than “the
bad-tempered, dark-haired little sister” herself.

To raise his hat and extend his hand was a natural impulse, and as
Polly rather grudgingly put her small fingers into his for one second,
Val had a distinct pang at his heart, for in truth the girl had a wan,
sorrowful look, and was unlike the little flashing-eyed spitfire who
had received him that bygone day, as it was possible for anyone to be.

Polly was grown thinner, and she looked slightly older. Her mourning
garb was not becoming to her, but the man opposite suddenly saw
something that was irresistibly sweet and even beautiful about her.

The omnibus was half empty, and in a little while they had it to
themselves, yet neither spoke till Polly rose, and signified her
intention of getting out, then Val got out, too.

He asked the girl if he could be of any assistance.

Polly treated him coldly till he spoke most gently of her father’s
death, then the tears welled up in her eyes.

“It is all so strange,” she said, in her pretty, wistful way; “and,
oh! I am so sorry for my poor little mother. We are alone, she and I.
Yes; we are still in the same old house. Winnie, my other sister, was
married just a week before father died, and Harold, my brother, is at
school. I am all my mother has to take care of her now.”

Val held her small hand.

She had reached her destination, a lawyer’s office.

“Will you let me come and see your mother?” he asked.

Polly looked at him doubtfully. How pretty she was with that
questioning look on her face! She colored faintly as she met his eyes.

“Yes; you may come if you like,” she said. “I may as well tell you,”
she added, with all her old frankness, “that I have hated you very
badly for upsetting us all as you did that day; but I suppose you
thought you were doing your duty. Anyhow, I will let you come and see
my mother, if you promise to be very kind to her.”

And with that she took her hand from his and disappeared, leaving him
with a mass of new and strange feelings that he did not seem equal to
deal with in that moment.

Late that afternoon he found himself still thinking of Polly, as he
reached the quiet hotel where he usually stayed, and he was only
recalled from that thought by the arrival of a telegram from Grace,
which was not easily comprehended at once.

“If you can come home to-morrow, please do,” Grace had written in her
message. “Something important has happened, and I should like you to be
here.”

This was sufficiently vague to trouble Val, and to drive his mind away
from all other matters, and yet while he smoked and pondered as to what
Grace’s message could possibly mean, the vision of Polly, as he had
just seen her, hovered persistently in and among his thoughts.

It was almost provoking the way this girl and her eyes haunted him, and
yet, such is the peculiarity of human minds, that Valentine searched
and brought back that memory each time it tried to fade away!

CHAPTER VII.

A MILD REQUEST.

Grace was standing on the platform at the Dynechester station the
afternoon of the next day, as the train from London pulled slowly up.

In her sealskin coat and cap she looked strikingly handsome, but more
than one of the people who knew her well had remarked a difference in
the girl’s usually bright, happy expression. In fact, Grace had a pale,
tired air this afternoon, very unlike her general bearing.

The brother’s eyes noted this from the railway carriage before they had
clasped hands.

“What’s amiss, Gracie?” Val asked, as they walked down the platform
together; “and what have you been doing to yourself? You look quite
ill.”

“I could not close my eyes last night,” Grace answered. “I had a great
shock yesterday. Oh! Val, it is nice to see you! I think last night was
the longest _year_ I have ever known. No; I don’t want to drive. Joseph
is coming down for your bag and things, and I can tell you better all
that has happened out here in the air as we walk.”

Valentine tucked his sister’s hand through his arm.

“Fire away, dear old girl!” was all he said.

He knew something of a heavy nature must have fallen on Grace to upset
her in this way; she was neither an alarmist nor a person given to any
form of exaggeration.

“Somehow I don’t believe you will be in the least surprised to hear
my news,” Grace said, as they walked briskly toward the Dower House,
avoiding the town.

The weather had changed. It was much colder.

Up in London there had been sleet and rain, but down here in the
country it was dry, flaky snow that was falling, whispering against
their faces not unpleasantly, and covering them with a thin white veil.

“Yesterday, just after you had gone,” Grace continued, “I had a
visitor. I had barely got home from the station, and was giving Joseph
some orders in the hall when there came the sound of carriage wheels,
and a loud peal at the bell, and before I knew where I was, Val, I
found myself face to face with Lady Wentworth.”

Val said “Ah!” and that was all; but the exclamation was full of
significance.

“You can imagine my astonishment,” Grace said, clinging to her big
brother, and pouring out all her story with a childlike eagerness. “I
am afraid I forgot my manners for a few seconds, I was so surprised;
but, of course, I soon recovered, and I asked her into my little room
and ordered tea just as if she were in the habit of coming every day.
She was quite as much at her ease, and she took the most comfortable
chair, and drank the tea with the air of a queen; but I saw her eyes
going round my little snuggery, and somehow everything seemed suddenly
to look old and shabby. What strange eyes she has, Val,” Grace said,
with a faint shiver. “They are so beautiful, and yet so cold and hard.”

“What did she want?” asked Valentine, after he had piloted his sister
round a rather bleak corner, and they were within a stone’s throw of
their home.

“Oh! something very simple in her view of the matter. But to me——”
Grace could not help her voice breaking for a moment. “Val, she wants
the Dower House. She wants our dear old home. She—she barely gives
us time to pack our things and get out of it. She wants it in such a
hurry!”

By the light of one of the old-fashioned lanterns slung from one
of the old walls Grace saw her brother’s face. It was very stern,
white and fixed, as though in pain. The next instant it changed as
the man, looking down, caught the tears in his sister’s eyes, and the
unhappiness of her expression.

“My poor little Gracie. This is awfully hard on you!” he said, tenderly.

“And on you, too, dear,” the girl answered.

She was silent a moment; then she said, quietly:

“Yes; it is hard. Very—very hard. Somehow it gets a little harder each
time I try to realize it, and I think the hardest bit of all is the
fact that Mark should be so unkind to us. For, of course,” Grace said,
with a sigh, “she could not have come as she did yesterday without
Mark’s knowledge and sanction. Could she, Val?”

Ambleton opened the doorway that led them through a large courtyard to
a side entrance of the house.

“Mark most possibly knows all there is to know by this time; but
whether he sanctioned it or not is quite another matter. I take it Lady
Wentworth is not the kind of nature to be controlled by the will of
anyone, least of all by such a will as Mark possesses. When she makes
up her mind to do a certain thing, that thing she will do, Gracie,
dear, if not by straight means, then by crooked ones! What excuse did
she give you for commanding this eviction?” Val asked, abruptly, and
with that curious grim smile of his, as they entered the house and
stood by the warmth of the hall fire for a few moments.

“She said,” Grace answered, as she slipped off her coat and shook it
free from the snow, “that her husband had decided to offer the Dower
House as a permanent home to her mother and sister. I gathered from
what she said that the father’s death had left them very poor. I
suppose you think this reason was fictitious, Val?”

Val did not answer all at once.

He had again before his eyes the memory of Polly as he had seen her
yesterday, and at this memory the hot anger in his heart melted a
little. Truly she had looked poor enough and very sorrowful. It would
have given him a touch of pleasure to cede his home to her, and to
that poor, weak mother she loved so well; but he knew without any need
of words that Christina Wentworth had not the smallest intention of
settling these two, either in Dynechester or elsewhere. It was but a
clever method on her part this suggestion of affection and care, and it
had been used merely as a means to an end.

To vent her spite on him, there was nothing this woman would not have
done willingly, and he was forced to confess that out of all the many
things she might have done she had chosen the one best calculated to
hurt him. The hurt was not for himself, but for Grace. The girl had a
love for the home she had lived in so long that could not be measured
by words, and Lady Wentworth must have understood this very quickly,
and laid her plans accordingly.

Val felt he was near the truth when he told Grace that Christina was
acting on her own account and intention entirely.

He knew all Mark Wentworth’s faults, and he condemned them as strongly
as they needed to be condemned; but he knew also that the very worst of
his cousin’s faults lacked the element of cruelty and the desire for
vengeance that was prominent in such a nature as Christina’s.

This attack, therefore, had been Christina’s conception alone. He
doubted even whether Mark Wentworth as yet knew anything of the matter,
and he had sufficient faith in the young man’s former affection for
himself and Grace to be sure that the news, when it was communicated
to Mark, would make a great impression on him. Naturally, if all this
quick summing up on Val’s part was true, and Christina had acted
without her husband’s knowledge, it would be a foregone conclusion that
she would be ready with some plausible explanation of her own invention
to smooth down Mark’s feelings on the matter. Or, perhaps, what was
even more possible, having so bold and strong a hold on her husband,
she would not trouble to give any explanation at all.

All these things, however, made the bitterness of the moment none the
less bitter to poor Grace, and Val hardly knew what line of sympathy
and consolation to offer to his sister.

The loss of a house was not irremediable under ordinary circumstances;
but Grace’s circumstances were not ordinary. Indeed, Val found it
difficult to picture his sister established anywhere else save in this
quaint, charming old dwelling.

“You are not going to fret and make yourself ill, Grace, I hope?” he
said, as the girl came and took off his heavy overcoat. “After all, if
we do leave the Dower House, we shall be still together, and that will
constitute a home wherever we are.”

Grace kissed him as she answered as cheerfully as she could:

“Of course I shan’t fret, dear. It—it is just now, at the very
beginning, that I feel things a little sharply. Last night—but I won’t
think of last night,” she added, resolutely. “You were not here, so it
made all the difference, Val. I have not thanked you for coming back
to-day. I hope you have not left any important business. I waited a
long time before I sent you that telegram, but finally I had to let it
go. I never felt so crushed and lonely in my life before.”

“Poor little Gracie!” Val held his sister’s hands in a caressing way
peculiar to him, and he drew her to him and kissed her brow. “We
will have a thorough confabulation together after dinner,” he said,
cheerily, “and now run along and put on a cozy teagown, and tell Joseph
to bring some champagne. I am going to insure you a good, sound sleep
to-night, whatever happens.”

Grace laughed almost in her old, bright way as she picked up her coat
and disappeared, and Val sent a tender look after the girl.

He had always had a pride in realizing the splendid qualities of his
sister’s nature, and he knew now that deep as this premeditated cruelty
on Christina’s part must cut, Grace would quickly rise superior to the
occasion.

He stood a long time in front of the blazing wood fire, and a little of
the unbounded regret that Grace must feel at parting from this dear,
cozy old home came to him.

He was far removed from being a sentimental man, but he was a man to
whom home and home ties appealed strongly, and, after all, the greater
portion of his life had been lived beneath this roof.

If he shut his eyes he could see in fancy his mother’s delicate, frail
figure pass slowly down the old oaken staircase; the day of her funeral
came back to him clearly in this moment of retrospection. He remembered
how the boy, Mark, had wept for the loss of his gentle, suffering aunt.
There had always been good in Mark’s heart, that small touch of human
sympathy which was so redeeming a quality.

Valentine felt sure had he yielded to impulse, and gone direct up to
his cousin at Sunstead, that this business would have been rearranged
in a very little while.

Though the rift between them was very wide, and seemed to grow wider
every day, Val did not allow himself to feel that the once strong bond
of affection that had existed between Mark and himself could be utterly
broken, and had his cousin been free now from any outside influence,
Val might not have hesitated to have gone direct to the young man and
in a few, plain words set the whole business right.

The very suggestion, however, of such a proceeding, under existing
circumstances, was, of course, impossible.

Christina ruled with an undivided sovereignty, and Val, though his hot,
quick anger rose at the knowledge of this, and of the most unworthy use
this woman was putting her influence to, resolved not to allow himself
to come in contact with his cousin’s wife, or to let Grace be subjected
any further, if this were possible, to the keen-edged spite of one whom
he regarded as being contemptible.

The dinner that night at the Dower House was a very serious matter.

Despite the champagne, and the warmth, and coziness of the
surroundings, Val could not succeed in driving the white, troubled look
from his sister’s face.

They talked the whole matter through in that practical, straightforward
way so characteristic of them both.

“Lady Wentworth asked me if we could vacate the house about the middle
of January. This leaves us very little time to fix ourselves anywhere,
Val, even if we had the smallest idea where to look for a new home,”
Grace had said at the commencement of the discussion.

Val resolutely thrust his own feelings into the background.

“I shall take a week’s holiday, and move everything myself. I flatter
myself I am worth two ordinary workmen,” he laughed, lightly. “We had
better send a few words to our Christmas guests, Grace, and explain
the situation to them.” But Grace, with a sudden rush of color to her
cheeks, negatived this.

“Let us have one more Christmas in our usual fashion. I—I don’t think
I shall ever care for Christmas again,” she said, as she bent down to
speak caressingly to her dogs, and to hide the rush of tears to her
eyes.

“You shall do all you want to do, dear,” Val said, tenderly, and
then he looked at her half quizzically, “and do you know, I fancy I
see something lurking in the corner of your eyes. Have you not been
formulating some little plan of your own that you have not told me
about?”

Grace smiled faintly.

“Why am I such a transparent person, I wonder? Yes,” she added,
frankly, a moment later, “I have a plan which I was going to try and
put in action before all this happened, Val. I want you to ask Mark to
consent to our having grannie to live with us. I am most unhappy about
her. She is so old, and suffers so much, and I—I fear,” Grace said,
in a low tone—“I fear, Val, she does not get the attention she needs.
Ellen made me very sad about her the other day. Of course, dear, if you
object, we won’t move in the matter, especially now,” and Grace paused
abruptly.

Val, however, took the matter up warmly.

“Now is just the moment to speak, Grace. I have already decided on our
new home. We will take that pretty house that poor Mrs. Bentley has
been so anxious to let ever since her husband’s death. I will go about
it to-morrow. We must remain in Dynechester. Apart from my appointment,
I am quite sure you would never be so happy anywhere else.”

“I feel,” Grace said, “that I ought to urge you to let me live in
London, then I could make a home for Sacha and for you, too, but——”

The brother understood the “but” to the full.

“Mrs. Bentley’s house is charming,” he said, cheerily; “it is almost as
old as this, and in your skillful hands will be quite as picturesque.
We can get into it without any very great bother, and to-night I will
write to Mark and propose your plan about grannie.”

Grace looked at her brother.

“If he should refuse?”

Val shook his head with a smile.

“Lady Wentworth likes a house with plenty of space at her disposal,” he
said, dryly, “and grannie is only a tiresome old woman, who takes much
too long to die.”

Grace had never heard her brother speak like this before. Her face grew
a little sadder.

“What will be Mark’s future?” she said, wistfully. “I could not help
thinking yesterday, Val, how much power lies in this woman’s hands.
I believe she could make Mark into something better than he had ever
been, and yet I am sure she will work in just the opposite direction.
How right you were to mistrust her!”

“And how right you were,” Valentine said to this, “to urge me not to
interfere in the matter when Mark’s determination was made. Had I never
gone to Christina Pennington that bygone day, it is possible Christina
Wentworth would have been our friend now instead of our enemy, Grace.
It was a big mistake, and I was so clumsy, I made the mistake worse a
hundred times than it need have been.”

He had Polly’s face before his eyes as he said this, and Polly’s
little, frank utterance of how much she had hated him for his
interference that day. It was wonderful what a softness came over his
angry thoughts when he remembered Polly.

“Did Lady Wentworth tell you when her mother and sister were coming?”
he asked.

Grace shook her head.

“She merely said she was going to establish them here. I suppose, Val,
we have no legal right to this house?”

“Absolutely none. The person who could claim this place for her
lifetime is poor grannie, but Lady Wentworth can easily afford to
dismiss her from all connection in the matter. Were it not for you,
Grace dear, and for all the thousand and one associations that are the
very essence of our home here, I should feel almost glad to think that
Lady Wentworth’s mother and sister should take our place. They are not
of the same world as she. I have always felt a little pang when I have
remembered poor Mrs. Pennington. She had a face that would go straight
to your heart, Grace, and the sister is——” Val paused, as though he
could not find the right word to apply to Polly, as, indeed, he could
not.

“The sister, then, is quite different to Lady Wentworth?” Grace said,
half listlessly.

She was beginning to feel the reaction of the mental excitement through
which she had passed, and Val’s hesitation did not convey anything to
her.

She rose as she spoke, and Valentine rose, too.

“Oh! yes; the sister is quite different,” he said, hastily, and with
that the subject of Polly dropped.

CHAPTER VIII.

WINNING A HUSBAND.

Polly made her way home after her interview with the lawyer, feeling a
little less depressed than she had done for some time.

Firstly, this interview had been more satisfactory than she had
anticipated, and the report she had to carry to her mother would be
cheering in a sense, and then, for some peculiar reason or other, it
had pleased her to meet Mr. Ambleton.

Though she had abused him so much and had felt so much anger toward
him, later events had occurred that justified Val’s conduct to a very
great extent in her eyes.

Polly saw now that if he had acted with a minimum of tact, he had been
actuated by the strongest feelings of consideration for the welfare of
a woman, who, after all, had been a complete stranger to him.

For the rest there was something that was attractive to Polly in this
man’s appearance. It was not that she considered him even fairly
good-looking, but she could not be insensible to his frank, pleasant
manner, and to the undoubted sympathy which had pervaded him in this,
their second and more agreeable meeting. Maybe, too, the fact that
Hubert Kestridge had testified so warmly to the many good qualities
that were crammed into Valentine Ambleton’s nature had the greatest
power of all in putting the man before her in a good light.

“Mother will be surprised to hear that I have met Mr. Ambleton,” Polly
said to herself, as she jolted home to Kensington in another omnibus.
“I rather hope he will come and see her. I feel somehow she might enjoy
his coming. My poor, little mother!” Polly added, with a sigh.

Her sympathy and pity for her mother were illimitable, and she was
quite ignorant that, on her side, Mrs. Pennington gave her unreasonable
sympathy and pity in return.

Things had been so sad, and so full of anxiety these last few weeks,
that Polly had not had time to sit down and realize the blow that had
fallen on her young heart. She was only conscious, in a dumb sort of
way, of a curious pain that seemed to lie heavily always in one spot,
and she knew she shrank sharply from even the remembrance of Winnie or
of the man who was now Winnie’s husband.

As to how Hubert Kestridge had fallen into this position of being
Winifred Pennington’s husband few people, and Polly last of all, could
have offered a thorough explanation. In truth, one person alone could
have afforded this explanation, and that person was Winnie herself.

The game she had played had been a very clever, and yet a very simple,
one. It is a game that has been played scores of times in the world’s
history, and may very easily be played many hundreds or scores again,
at least so long as there exist women of the caliber of Winifred
Pennington. Given two natures so honest, so proud and yet so open to
influence as Kestridge’s and Polly’s, it will be seen at a glance that
Winifred’s task of alienating them even before they had thoroughly
realized what lay in their hearts, and substituting herself in the
guise of the necessary sympathy, was not a phenomenally difficult
one. Worked by her sister’s slender, iron, little hands, Polly was
transformed into a sharp-tongued, bad-tempered creature, in whose eyes
Hubert could do nothing but wrong. The few weeks he spent in town were
made miserable to him by Polly’s apparently undisguised contempt and
dislike for him, and if it had not been for Winnie he would have left
his self-selected task of looking after Mrs. Pennington’s affairs, and
gone back to Ireland in a violent rage. It was not, however, possible
for him to leave, while Winnie made such constant demands on his
sympathy.

“Oh! don’t go, Hubert,” she used to plead, eagerly, her eyes, filled
with tears, upraised to him. “You are such a comfort. I don’t know what
mother and I shall do when you go back to Ireland.”

“It seems to me I don’t do much, according to Polly’s ideas,” Hubert
had said, gloomily, on more than one occasion, “I know I am not much
account, but still—I came to see if Aunt Phœbe, and——”

Winnie was always ready with some pretty, soothing word. She was always
sweet and gentle with him; always so pretty to look at, that her
influence stole imperceptibly over the man’s troubled heart, and one
evening it came to pass that he was holding Winnie’s neat little figure
in his arms, and was kissing away her tears, and promising her all the
happiness and sunshine she longed for so ardently, poor child! It had
been a repeated story of the misery of life under the same roof with
Polly that, ending in a flood of passionate tears, had driven Winifred,
like a child, to Hubert for comfort, and in less than sixty seconds the
words were spoken, the link tied, and Polly was lost to him forever!
The marriage had followed swiftly on this. Again it had been Winnie’s
work.

“Take me away,” was her perpetual cry. “Oh! Hubert, take me away. I
am so unhappy here. Why must we wait for anything? Oh! I don’t want a
grand marriage. I only want peace and happiness and you!”

And so one fine morning Polly, coming up from the kitchen, where she
had been preparing a dainty little luncheon to tempt her mother’s
appetite, found that mother sitting in the dining room with an open
letter in her hand.

The woman’s eyes were dry, but they held a strange expression in them,
and Polly knew instantly that something fresh had happened.

“Darling, what is it?” she had whispered, running up to that silent,
pathetic, little creature.

Mrs. Pennington’s own pain was instantly lost in the pain she knew she
was about to deal this other dear heart, for Polly’s secret had been no
secret to her mother.

“Polly, you are all that is left to me,” she said, and she forced a
smile to her pale lips. “Can you guess what this letter has told me?”

Polly looked down and saw Winifred’s neat writing.

Her face went as white as the apron she wore, and for one instant she
felt cold from head to foot. Then she conquered herself.

“Why, it is the easiest thing to guess in the world, my lovee, dear!
This letter is from Winnie, and it is to tell you that she—she and
Hubert are married.”

Mrs. Pennington took the girl’s hand in hers, and kissed it tenderly.
She felt that hand so chill and trembling, that she was well-nigh
breaking down; but for Polly’s sake she controlled herself. The girl’s
mind must be diverted, if possible, from the full weight of this blow,
and Mrs. Pennington played her rôle accordingly.

Winifred’s news had given her a great shock, and though she could not
possibly object to the marriage, she did resent most keenly the way in
which the matter had been carried out.

She saw in Winnie’s conduct a repetition of the heartless selfishness
that had characterized Christina’s whole attitude during the past and
especially the later past.

Mrs. Pennington had not been blind to all Winnie’s maneuvers with
Hubert, and she had had a longing more than once to speak out plainly,
and set matters right in the young man’s mind where Polly was
concerned; but she was a woman of infinite delicacy and tact, and,
moreover, she had never imagined that Winnie’s artful artlessness would
have reached such a point in such a short time.

There was nothing to excuse this hurried and secret marriage; indeed,
there was every reason why Winnie, if she had studied her right duty,
should have set aside the thought of marriage until the difficult
pathway of her parents’ troubles had been made a little smoother at
least.

In her very natural resentment at this hasty act, Mrs. Pennington found
herself condemning the man more even than the girl.

“Hubert has acted in a way I should never have believed it possible for
him to act,” she said to Polly, after the matter had been discussed in
a few short sentences. “I have always thought that he had a sincere
affection for me.”

“Do not doubt that, mother, darling,” Polly had answered, in a low,
hurried voice. “Hubert loves you most dearly.”

“Then, if he loves me, he has taken a very strange way of showing it.
Surely some consideration was due to me. What is the meaning of this
marriage at all? Hubert’s duty was to come to me, to speak out his
intentions, and to have abided by my decision. I am deeply hurt, Polly,
and it is useless for me to pretend otherwise, and how I am to explain
the matter to your father I hardly know.”

The attitude her mother adopted was one that gave Polly sharp pain in
one respect, but in another Mrs. Pennington’s outspoken blame did good.
It roused the girl from that curious blighting sense of stupefaction
that the realization of Winifred’s treachery had brought. For, to
herself, Polly did not disguise matters. She knew Winnie had been a
traitress to her, and she understood all those hurtful words Winnie had
spoken so frequently in their true meaning, now that it was too late.

She was bitterly grieved, poor little Polly, to have to hold such
thoughts in her heart against her sister; but she was essentially
just, and she knew she was not wronging Winnie one iota when she set
down the whole blame of this marriage to the girl, and not to the man.
She grieved, too, for Hubert’s sake, for she, perhaps, out of all the
world, knew Winnie in her true character, and she feared for the future.

Her own feelings had been, as we know, wholly chaotic where Hubert was
concerned, and this transformation of him into another being—that of
a brother—put a definite stop to all the vague dreams and thoughts he
had awakened in her mind. Nevertheless, he had always been dear to her,
and he would remain dear, even though she might have to stand aloof and
never minister to him, or give him a word of sympathy.

They were sad days, those days that had followed on Winnie’s marriage.

The bride and bridegroom had gone abroad.

“You know I am always ill in the winter, so Hubert is going to give me
all the sunshine he can,” Winnie had written in her explanatory letter,
and Mrs. Pennington had winced here once again at the unblushing
selfishness of her child.

To take Hubert out of reach at this particular crisis was worthy of
Winnie, or Christina.

Polly felt both glad and sorry. Glad for her own sake, but very, very
sorry for her mother.

They were drawn closer together than they had ever been in their lives
in that time, and the mother found a deep joy out of all her sorrow in
testing and proving the sweetness, the beauty of the youngest girl’s
heart.

Then had come that other blow, that unexpected death of the husband and
father, and the smaller griefs and regrets were all swallowed up in
this great one.

Polly was not quite sure how she had managed to get through those days.
She had been the one creature available to do everything, for though
there were plenty of relations who might have come forward and aided
her, these relations were careful to keep out of the way. They feared
being asked for material help.

Poor Robert Pennington’s misfortunes were too widely known among his
family to admit of much tangible sympathy being offered. But Polly
wanted none of them. She did everything there was to be done, and right
well she did it. With the lawyer’s sanction she determined that she and
her mother should remain in their old home until they were fortunate
enough to let the house.

Of course, they had to pay taxes, but they were rent free, and it was
better to incur no expense of moving till they were obliged to go.

Christina had written a very guarded letter to her mother, offering
assistance, but Polly had sent a curt refusal.

She was hotly angry with Lady Wentworth, who made no suggestion of
paying her mother a visit, and she felt she would like to have taken
Christina and shaken her violently.

How much the girl was spared at this moment she little knew, for could
she but have imagined that for the sake of spite and revenge Christina
was actually pretending a generosity toward herself and her mother,
Polly’s weight of care would have been made much heavier than it was.
As it was, she felt she had said farewell to both her sisters, and that
her mother would have, in truth, in future only one daughter upon whom
she could rely.

“We are going to live together, all our lives,” she said every day to
her mother; “and some day, oh! yes, some day, lovee, we shall be so
happy! We shall let this big old house and go and live in the country,
and we will find a sweet little cottage covered with roses—and—and
things,” though Polly was now quite grown up and important, she was
still the old Polly in the matter of phraseology—“and Harold shall
come home there for his holidays, and we will play cricket, and you
shall grow fat. You promise me you will grow fat in the country, won’t
you, sweetheart? And I shall milk the cows and do a lot of farm work.”
And the flood of nonsense would flow on till Polly had succeeded in
winning a smile from her mother’s wan, sad face, and then the girl was
content.

“I must make her happy again. I must—I must!” Polly would say, to
herself at night, when she lay awake in the small room adjoining her
mother’s. “How I wish I were big and strong, like Mr. Ambleton. One can
command so much when one is big, but when one is small, and a girl,
too—well, there is not much one can do but hope and pray, and pray and
hope!”

CHAPTER IX.

BEYOND RECONCILIATION.

It had been all Polly’s work that she and her mother were remaining on
in their old home indefinitely.

When the moment for final settlement had arrived, the girl had
overruled her mother.

“We can, of course, find a small house somewhere, but by the time we
have moved and the rent and the rates and taxes paid, you see if we
are not more out of pocket than if we remained on here. The lease is
ours for another fifteen years, isn’t it, mother, darling? And though
the taxes are heavy, we can be very economical in other ways, and then
there is space for you to move about in, and air for you to breathe,
and a place for Harold to racket in when he comes home. I could not
endure you to be shut up in one of those poky houses, at least so long
as you are able to stay here, and it seems to me the most sensible
thing to do to live on till we sell or let the house.”

“I am afraid we shall be considered wrong in doing this,” Mrs.
Pennington said, nervously.

Polly’s eyes flashed fire.

“Who is going to interfere with us?” she demanded. “Who has the right
to interfere, I should like to know?”

Mrs. Pennington smiled faintly.

“People don’t always stop to consider if they have the right to
speak, Polly,” she said, then she paused a moment. “I heard from your
Grandmother Pennington this morning. Oh! it is a very kind letter.”

Polly’s lip curled, and there was still anger in her eyes.

“I know the sort of ‘kind’ letter Grannie Pennington can write. May I
see this letter, mother, dear?”

Mrs. Pennington at once gave it to the girl.

“We have no secrets, you and I, have we?” she said, and she rubbed her
hand softly up and down the girl’s arm. “How could I ever have imagined
that my wild little Polly could have grown up into such a wise and
clever person?”

Polly crouched down at her mother’s knees.

“Do I comfort you, then, a little, my sweet love?” she asked.

“A little? Why, Polly, do you realize that you are my all now?”

Polly laid her cheek on her mother’s hand.

“We shall be happy together yet. You see if we are not. We—we only
want time.”

Mrs. Pennington caressed the rough, brown curls; she could hardly see
them for tears. Remembrance had brought back to her swiftly a vision
of old, dead days, when her children had been little more than babies,
and her husband had chided her, tenderly enough, for the most natural
pride and love she had always had in her eldest born, her lovely little
Christina. It gave her a pang now to recall the love she had lavished
so freely, and that had given her back no love in return.

The queer little brown baby, Polly, had always crept very closely to
her father’s heart. The wife had known this, but Robert Pennington had
made no distinction in his affection for his children; he had been
essentially a just man. There was a strong element of her father in
Polly, and the mother’s heart was full of pride in the girl’s proud
courage that fought not only against a first great sorrow, but against
all the heavy difficulties that faced them now.

Polly’s influence was of far greater value than she had the least idea
of herself.

Mrs. Pennington found herself unconsciously emulating the girl in
courage and determination.

Sorrow such as hers would never be wholly shaken off; but despair could
not live while she had before her eyes the daily example of Polly’s
earnest resolution to live through her trouble; and Mrs. Pennington
knew that the full weight of the girl’s hurt was something that was
only revealed to her now day by day.

Though Hubert Kestridge had spoken no words and Polly had not even
confessed the truth to herself, the mother was only too well aware
of the pain that lay at the bottom of the cup of sorrow Polly had
to drain. Life truly stretched before the girl, but it would be a
long, long time before Winnie’s selfishness and treachery would be
a forgotten thing. For neither Mrs. Pennington nor Polly deceived
themselves about this marriage.

They knew Winifred had made herself Hubert Kestridge’s wife purely and
simply because she had no intention of facing the poverty and struggle
that life in the old home must have been to her. She cared about as
much for the man she had married as she cared for an old, discarded
glove, and herein lay the sharpest sting for Polly, for though Hubert
Kestridge was now passed out of her life, and ought not even to have a
place in her thoughts, such was her nature that the knowledge of what
lay before him in his marriage could not fail but grieve her.

Nevertheless, she was so brave, so cheerful and so ready to take on
her shoulders the whole burden of her mother’s cares, that she acted
on that mother in the most beneficial way possible, and the two became
in these days not merely a loving parent and child, but two devoted
friends and comrades eager to fight side by side.

They avoided, by common consent, all discussion of either Christina or
Winifred, neither of whom had done anything to show their mother love
and thought in her widowhood.

The Kestridges, of course, were abroad, but Lady Wentworth was within a
couple of hours of town, and Polly had expected that her eldest sister
would surely have left the grandeur of her new home to appear for a few
hours at least in the sorrowful atmosphere of the old one when the news
of her father’s death had been sent her. But Christina was thorough
in all she did, and she evinced no desire whatever to hurry to her
mother’s side.

She wrote a few constrained words to her mother, and to Polly she sent
a curt epistle, announcing that as she supposed ready money would be
necessary she would be prepared to send a check for fifty pounds when
it was needed.

To this Polly sent back a reply.

    “When you are asked to send money,” she had written, “you may
    rest assured it will be accepted. In the meanwhile, let me advise
    you to spend this fifty pounds in buying yourself a fine, black
    gown to mark the heaviness of your grief, and the respect which
    has been such a prominent feature of your attitude toward your
    father and mother.

    “Yours,

    “MARY PENNINGTON.”

She had written and posted this in a fit of temper that was not to
be measured, and she had not repented of so doing when the temper
was gone, though she felt she had cut off any possibility of a
reconciliation with Christina by this act. She said nothing to her
mother about it.

“She would only fret more than she does now,” was what she said to
herself.

Polly’s high-handed treatment of her sister gave her a certain
satisfaction, but the manipulation of certain business with her
father’s lawyer gave her far more. This business was purely personal,
and had been carried out by her quite unknown to her mother.

Her father’s will, made a couple of years before, had been duly read
and proved, although so great had been the change in the dead man’s
affairs that this will had had as little value attached to it as the
paper on which it was written. But apart from the will, there had been
a certain sum of insurance money which Robert Pennington had always
intended should be divided between his three daughters. In the event of
either one of them being well married and provided, the money was to go
to the ones or one as the case might be, left unmarried; and should all
three be married, then the money was to go to the boy, Harold, to be
used for him as his mother should think fit. Polly, therefore, at her
father’s death, inherited this money.

This arrangement had been made when Mr. Pennington had reckoned
confidently on leaving his widow, if not a wealthy woman, at least in a
condition of complete comfort, but the severe losses he had sustained
in his business during the last year of his life, had seen his careful
provision for his wife melt away with his other capital, and at the
time of his death Mrs. Pennington had nothing she could call her own,
save a very small yearly income she had inherited from her father.

“Now,” said Polly to the lawyers in her most businesslike way, when the
matter of the insurance money was laid before her, and she became aware
that she could claim about three thousand pounds as her own—“now,
since you tell me this money is mine, I will tell you what I am going
to do with it. I am going to invest it in an annuity for my mother. Oh!
yes, I am!” this rather defiantly. “I know all about what I mean to
do, and I have quite made up my mind to do it. My mother is far more
important than I am, and I want her to feel she has something certain,
if small, to live upon during her lifetime. She can then do as much as
she wants to for my brother’s education, and as I make my home with her
I shall share all she has. Please arrange this for me.”

Polly had finished with an air that conveyed her desire to have no
further discussion on the matter. Her journey that morning she had met
Valentine in the omnibus had been to the lawyers to receive the news
that her command had been executed.

“And when it is done I shall tell her myself, and then, as the matter
cannot be undone, she will resign herself to circumstances.”

This is what Polly said to the solicitor when she bade him
good-morning, but, as a matter of fact, she had no intention of telling
her mother anything about it.

She had constituted herself the business man for the moment, and she
could very easily let her mother understand that the winding up of the
estate had been more satisfactory than had been imagined. Of course,
Polly had had any amount of protest to meet with from the lawyers when
she announced her determination to urge her mother to remain on in the
big house. She had an answer, however, for all that was put forward
against this.

“Suppose,” it was suggested to her, “that Mrs. Pennington gets no offer
for the house, what then?”

“Why, then,” said Polly, promptly, “we shall live in it till the
expiration of our lease, by which time any amount of things may have
happened. We shall only use a portion of the house. Mother is going to
sell some of the more valuable furniture, and we have dismissed all the
servants but one. If you can show me that this is going to ruin us, I
am prepared to be assured of the fact.”

“That girl has got a head on her shoulders!” was one of the remarks
that was made after Polly had departed triumphant out of the lawyers’
office.

“And a —— good will of her own into the bargain,” was a second remark
made not without admiration for this same will.

Polly, meanwhile, carried out all her plans, and she was so energetic,
so helpful and so bright and courageous, as we have said, that she
imbued her mother with some of her spirit, and long before the new year
had dropped out of its newness, the two women had settled down into a
quiet, even life that had its share of work and thought to lift them
out of too deep a measure of sorrow.

Polly’s brain did an infinite amount of traveling in these days.

She was turning over a number of schemes in her head, needless to say,
schemes that would bring little grist to the mill, and insure her
mother even more comfort than she had now.

One day she thought of starting a cooking class, a second day she
pictured herself as mistress of dancing to a crowd of little children,
a third she had some other idea.

It would be easy, she told herself, to make some use of the big empty
rooms, if only once she would hit on just the thing to do. Teaching in
the ordinary sense of the word, was something Polly never would have
attempted.

“First of all, I know nothing,” she said to herself, candidly; “and,
then, I should just get mad with irritation and impatience. I would
rather sweep a crossing than be a governess.”

Nevertheless, each day as it went emphasized the necessity more in
the girl’s mind that something must be done to add to the very modest
income on which they had to live. Harold’s school bills alone made big
inroads into this income, and it was only by strenuous efforts that
Polly was able to steer clear of debt.

As her mother had foretold, the family in general expressed unqualified
disapproval of the arrangement by which Robert Pennington’s widow
remained on in the old house, and this disapproval took the form of
absenting themselves from the modest menage. Even Mrs. Pennington’s
sister, Hubert Kestridge’s stepmother, held herself aloof, but, then,
as Polly knew right well, the marriage with Winnie had been exceedingly
objectionable to her Aunt Nellie, and she and her mother had to bear
the brunt of this anger.

“I don’t think I care very much if I don’t see anyone of my relations
again,” Polly frequently informed herself.

The attitude of the family indeed acted on her as a kind of spur.
It made her desire for independence greater than ever, and her
determination to stand firm by her mother more eager.

As Christmas had passed, and the new year had come, Polly found herself
wondering at odd times if that big Mr. Ambleton would ever pay them a
visit.

“As he asked himself, I think it would be rather rude if he did not
come,” she said once to her mother. “Not that I want him, however,” she
added, quickly.

Mrs. Pennington said, in her quiet, soft way, that she thought she
would like to see Mr. Ambleton.

“From what Hubert said of him, I feel sure he must be a nice man,” she
remarked.

“Well,” said Polly to this, “if he is not nice he must be awfully
horrid, for there is so much of him! Big people ought to have more
virtues than little ones.”

“Somehow,” said Mrs. Pennington, looking up from her sewing and
falling, as she always now endeavored to do, into Polly’s mood,
“somehow I think I like little people best, Polly.”

And Polly kissed her.

“Then, now I know you like me a tiny, teeny bit, you darling!” she said.

And after this she sat and watched her mother’s white, thin fingers as
they threaded a needle and stitched away industriously, and while she
watched she dreamed the only dream dear to her young heart now—the
dream of giving this loved being all those things that her devotion
determined were the proper accompaniment of life for such a mother as
she possessed.

CHAPTER X.

A WILFUL WOMAN.

Valentine did not lose any time in writing to his cousin to broach the
subject of his grandmother.

He made absolutely no reference to the dismissal from the Dower House.
He wrote tersely, and put Grace’s wish into as few words as possible,
and he directed the letter, as usual, to Mark at Sunstead.

He was busy starting all the arrangements for their move—he had not
lost an hour in obtaining the house he had desired to have—when an
answer was brought to his letter.

It was an answer written in a bold, feminine hand, and Valentine’s
brows met fiercely as he saw this.

Christina wrote curtly, informing him that in her husband’s absence
she had opened the letter, and she begged to inform him that she must
unhesitatingly refuse, in her husband’s name, his suggestion of moving
old Lady Wentworth from her present quarters.

    “Your grandmother is far too weak to undertake any exertion, and
    the mere idea of removing her from a place in which she has lived
    so long, savors, to me at least, of cruelty. I fail to understand
    why Miss Ambleton cannot visit her grandmother at Sunstead as
    formerly. Pray let it be understood that I make no protest to her
    doing this; in fact, I consider it to be a neglect of a positive
    duty on her part if she continues to abstain from coming in the
    future.”

Valentine threw down the letter with a laugh so strange that Grace,
who happened to be passing through the hall, wearing a pale and
half-bewildered air—the uprooting of her home goods was a terrible
business to her, poor girl!—looked at him startled.

“What is it, Valentine?” she asked, quickly.

“It is only a moment of unreasoning anger, my dear,” Valentine
answered, after a little pause; “I have a desire to strangle a woman,
that is all.”

Grace drew a deep breath.

“You have heard from Mark?” she queried.

Valentine laughed again.

“Mark has ceased to exist. The woman he has married is Mark and
herself, too. Good God! and to think I was fool enough to imagine this
creature was a woman to be saved from sorrow, and perhaps from shame.
How she must have laughed at me!”

Grace read through the letter quietly.

“Despite her evident intention to wound and insult there is an element
of truth in what she says, Valentine,” was her remark, made very
gently, as she refolded the letter. “Grannie is very old and ailing,
and she has been so many years at Sunstead that it is possible the mere
fact of strange surroundings might hasten her end.”

Valentine was silent a long while, and Grace watched him as he occupied
himself in stripping the walls of innumerable weapons that he had hung
there from time to time.

The events of the last few days had completely changed Grace. She
looked tired, ill and subdued. With every desire to hold herself
bravely through the strange, unexpected circumstances of the moment,
she found herself fretting incessantly.

Valentine looked down at her after a long pause.

“This is a second grief to you, Grace, dear, I fear,” he said, his
voice its usual tone again.

Grace shook her head.

“Not altogether, for I had felt that our request would be refused.”

The girl stood a moment by the fireplace, looking wistfully about the
old hall that was beginning to wear a chaotic and disconsolate air
already.

“Valentine,” she said, in a low, grave voice, “if you don’t mind, I
shall now make a rule of going to see grannie every day for at least
half an hour. There are certain circumstances that make personal
feelings a matter of indifference, and I need never come in contact
with Lady Wentworth.”

“You shall do just what seems best to you, dear,” Val made answer,
gently.

And after that day, though he asked nothing, he knew that Grace stole
an hour out of the worry and bustle of the removal to go up and sit
with the fading old woman she loved so dearly, and who could not count
on many more days on earth.

Christmas had passed, and Sacha had come down from town. To Grace’s
delight, her younger brother announced his determination to stay and
join in the business of the moment.

Grace had an unbounded pride and love for Val, but for Sacha she had
more tenderness. The brothers were not very much alike. Sacha was a
smaller build altogether. He was a very handsome young man, with an air
of delicacy about him. This delicacy it was that made him so dear to
Grace. She fussed about him as though she had been his mother.

Sacha had big, soft, brown eyes, that always had an unconscious touch
of pleading in them. He was by nature as much Valentine’s inferior,
as far as unselfishness and sterling, straightforward goodness went,
as his strength and stature were visibly inferior to those of his big
brother.

Were he and Valentine to have been much thrown together, they must
inevitably have come to loggerheads, but the brothers seldom met.

There was a considerable amount of good in Sacha Ambleton, but there
were also several qualities in his nature which he never desired to
bring to his brother’s knowledge.

Mark Wentworth had swiftly found out those qualities, and Val would
have been bitterly surprised could he have known that Sacha, if he had
not actually assisted and associated with his cousin in his foolish,
dissipated life, had certainly never considered he had the moral right
to censure these follies.

Had the matter ever been threshed out between Valentine and himself,
Sacha’s views of the situation would have been summed up most probably
in the remark given, good-humoredly, that he was a man of the world,
and did not see that Mark was doing anything very much out of the
common, but, unfortunately, perhaps, things had never got so far
between Valentine and himself.

Sacha had heard, of course, from both his brother and sister of
the rupture between themselves and his cousin, and he had written
most sympathetically to Grace on the subject. He had not thought it
necessary to tell Grace that he had had Mark’s version of the matter
also, and he certainly had no intention whatever of letting Grace know
that his real sympathy went with Mark Wentworth, and not with Valentine.

“Hang it all!” he had said to himself, “Mark is not a child, and he has
every right to take a wife if he chooses to do so. Val has overstepped
his limits this time. He ought to remember that Mark is his own master,
and it was a decidedly unnecessary act to go and set the girl against
the marriage. I think Val deserves all the snubbing he may get. But if
all I hear is true, I fancy the new Lady Wentworth must be a woman of
spirit, and will not accept Val’s interference very meekly.”

A theory that was amply proved to Sacha when the news came of
Christina’s attitude toward his brother and sister, more especially
when he heard of the eviction from the Dower House.

“Val has met his master for once,” he said to himself, with a faint
smile. Since he would suffer no discomfort himself by this change of
houses, he was rather amused than otherwise at the first working of
Christina’s power, though the moment he met Grace and saw how really
troubled the girl was, Sacha was truly moved to pity.

He was honestly fond of Grace, and he never remembered to have seen her
so ill and sorrowful as she was now.

It was certainly hard, too, that Grace should suffer for Val’s doings.

He made himself very sweet to his sister, and though he had a way of
disappearing when extra help was needed, his pretty words were almost
as acceptable to Grace as Valentine’s hours of packing, lifting and
settling.

Val worked like several horses rolled into one. He turned himself for
the nonce into a carpenter, a plumber, a picture hanger and, indeed,
every other sort of convenient and necessary person.

With his strong arms always ready, the furniture was moved about like
magic, and Grace’s new home swiftly began to look cozy and pretty.

The girl always found something fresh done when she returned from her
daily journey to her grandmother’s sick room, and Val was amply paid by
seeing the color begin to steal into his sister’s cheeks and the old
brightness come back to her eyes.

Sacha had fallen into the habit of walking with Grace up to Sunstead.
Old Lady Wentworth always had been fond of him, and though she was
very feeble and her mind wandered a little at times, she took distinct
pleasure in seeing Sacha’s handsome face.

Sometimes he would wait and accompany Grace homeward, but more than
once she missed him and went on her way alone.

She always imagined on such occasions that Sacha had wandered into the
cathedral and was probably making some rough sketch or other. It never
entered her head to suppose anything so extraordinary as that Sacha
should be sitting in Christina’s boudoir, chatting and drinking tea
with as much ease as though he had known his cousin’s wife all his life!

Sacha had caught sight of Christina the first time he had gone to
Sunstead with Grace, and he had boldly taken the bull by the horns, and
had asked for an audience, introducing himself with his own particular
charm, and claiming cousinship.

“Mark told me I was to come and see you,” he said, and Christina
received him graciously.

She saw at a glance the wide difference between him and his brother
and sister, and she guessed just as quickly that by encouraging him
she would give another sting to the man she told herself she hated so
thoroughly.

The acquaintance between Sacha and Mark’s wife was not long in
blossoming into an intimacy.

Mark was boisterously glad to welcome Sacha, and Christina’s vanity
was flattered and soothed. A portrait was instantly started, and Sacha
began to go to Sunstead at all hours. It was quite by chance that this
information came to Valentine’s ears.

He was not altogether deceived by his brother’s sweetness. He knew
Sacha could be very selfish. Neither was Val altogether in sympathy
with the life the younger man had chosen; but still he was far from
imagining how little real depths there was in Sacha’s professed
affection, and it gave him a shock when Grace’s maid, Ellen, in casual
mention of Sunstead and its inmates, spoke of Sacha’s constant presence
there, and of the wonderful picture he was painting.

Ellen was in the habit of going up constantly to old Lady Wentworth, so
there could be no doubt there must be an element of some truth in what
she said.

Val was in his new “den” when this new annoyance came to him.

Ellen had brought him a cup of coffee and a batch of letters by the
afternoon post. She was in the habit of chatting familiarly with both
her master and mistress.

Valentine sat frowning after she had gone. He saw in this more of
Christina’s clever and spiteful work, and at this, the beginning, did
not blame his brother so much.

“Sacha cannot resist a beautiful woman. As far as I am concerned,
he can go as often as he likes; but I am not thinking of myself in
this business now. The woman’s treatment of Grace puts a different
complexion on everything, and I must resent it. Sacha’s friendship will
complicate matters. I wondered why he did not go back to town.”

Valentine opened his letters mechanically, and ran through them
indifferently.

They were all business except one, which bore an Italian stamp.
Glancing at the signature, Valentine’s face took a gleam of pleasure.
He liked Hubert Kestridge sincerely.

Hubert wrote to ask him a favor.

    “I want to interest you in a boy, a semi-connection of mine. I
    suppose, in a sense, he is a relation now, since he happens to
    be my wife’s brother. He has been in school in Germany; but he
    had to come home suddenly the other day on account of illness.
    He is now with his mother, Mrs. Pennington, and I am sure this
    poor woman must be worrying herself to know what to do with him.
    Pennington left no money, and the boy must earn his living. I
    want you to tell me if you think you could do anything for me in
    this matter. My wife is, unfortunately, very delicate, and this
    keeps me away from England for some weeks longer. Meanwhile,
    time is precious, and, believe me, I shall take it as a proof of
    personal favor and friendship to me if you can at any time put
    this boy in the way of doing something for himself. Perhaps you
    may find time to see him one of these days.”

Valentine folded up the letter, and then he went on with his task
of making his new room as comfortable as he could, bestowing his
multitudinous papers in cupboards and boxes and putting his books on
the shelves, and all the time he was working he was conscious of a
warm, pleasant sensation at his heart, and it was only by degrees that
he realized this sensation came at the remembrance that on the morrow
he would go to London, and that he should see Polly Pennington.

CHAPTER XI.

THE BOY’S RETURN.

Harold’s unexpected return home was at once a pleasure and a trouble to
Polly.

She was deeply attached to her brother; in truth, despite her girlish
infatuation for Christina’s beauty, Polly had always had more sympathy
with the bright, mischievous boy, who had been so dear to her dead
father, than she had had for either of her sisters.

It was not merely that both her mother and herself were made anxious
by Harold’s illness, there was the material difficulty of his future
staring them straight in the face.

Something must be done for him; but what that something was to be
neither of them could tell. One point, however, was clear—further
schooling was out of the question.

Had it not been that the severity of the winter abroad tried him too
hardly, Harold would have had another six months, or perhaps a year,
in Germany; but now that he was back in London it was a question of
setting him to some profession, not of seeking out further education
for him.

Polly’s trouble about this matter increased considerably after Harold
had been home a few days, for it came to her then only too surely that
the boy’s condition of health was more seriously delicate than she
had imagined. The attack of influenza and pleurisy that had been the
cause for sending him away from the rigorous winter in Dresden had left
something more than ordinary delicacy behind.

There was a look in the lad’s face that made Polly’s heart contract
with a pang.

She kept this new worry to herself, hoping, indeed, that she might be
mistaken, and, above all, that her mother should not have the same idea
as herself about Harold; but it was a trouble that she found very hard
to bear, and that haunted her closely.

She was alone in the big desolate-looking house when the servant
announced the arrival of Valentine Ambleton.

Her mother and Harold had gone out on a shopping expedition, devised by
Polly to give them both some amusement, and she was occupied in walking
about the large, half-empty drawing room, wondering for the hundredth
time in what way she could utilize it so that it might bring some
small addition to their limited exchequer, when the door opened and
Valentine’s big form appeared.

Black was not the most becoming setting to Polly’s dark prettiness, and
her humbly made black serge gown was fitted to a figure that had grown
very, very thin of late. The girl had a fragile as well as a sad look,
and Valentine had difficulty in recognizing the former little spitfire
in this subdued young creature.

Sight of him, however, brought a kind of excitement to Polly, and as
they sat and talked the old vivacity and color flashed into her eyes
once again.

She had greeted him most naturally, but, of course, she was very
outspoken.

“You have been a long time coming,” she informed him after a while;
“but, truth to tell, I never expected you would come at all.”

“I should like to know why you thought that,” Val said.

“Oh! because so many people one meets stop and pretend they are glad to
see one, and are dying to come and see one again, and they never come
near the house. Not that I want any of them,” cried Polly, in her most
independent manner; “but I hate and detest all who forget my mother.”

“I am not a forgetful person, Miss Pennington,” Val said, quietly.

Polly looked at him sideways out of her sparkling eyes.

“I think you have a good opinion of yourself. Big people are every bit
as conceited as little ones, I find.”

Valentine laughed.

“Well, if I am conceited you must try and take it out of me, for I hope
to see a great deal of you now if you will let me come. I should have
been here long ago, but I have had to help my sister. We have been
moving into another house.”

“Oh! you poor things,” Polly said, sympathetically. “A move is a real
calamity. I should hate it. We are told by all our relations that we
have no business here, and that we ought to move; but I won’t let my
mother budge. I know everybody considers we ought to bury ourselves in
a tiny house in the suburbs, but mother has lived in this big house
ever since I can remember anything, and I mean to keep her here as long
as I can. But why have you moved?” she queried, in her frank, direct
way. “Hubert Kestridge made us all envious by his description of your
dear old home in Dynechester. Were you obliged to leave it?”

“The Dower House belongs to Sir Mark Wentworth, and he requires it,”
Valentine explained. Had he needed confirmation of his theory that
Christina’s excuse had been invented, Polly’s words would have given
it to him, but he had, as we know, at once discredited her declared
intention of offering the old house as a home to her mother and sister,
so Polly’s surprise at his news did not astonish him.

Polly said “Oh!” to his explanation, then she took him downstairs out
of the large drawing room to a more cozy corner.

“Mother will be in directly, and then we will have tea. I don’t have
a fire in the drawing room very often, it makes too much work for one
servant, especially as my brother is at home just now. They had to send
him away from his school in Dresden. He has been ill.”

Valentine stood on the hearthrug in front of the dining-room fire.
It was the room where that unpleasant scene had been enacted on that
bygone day.

He remembered it now with a strong rush of anger for his folly in
attempting to do what he had tried to do, and yet, as he glanced at
the girl who was flitting about preparing the tea table, and making
everything ready for her mother’s return, he felt a touch of real
pleasure mingle in with the jarred feelings. For if that bygone day
had brought him in contact with Christina and her worthless nature, as
Valentine uncompromisingly considered it, it had also been the means of
introducing him to this other girl, who, for some occult reason, had
found an abiding place in his thoughts.

As Polly chatted on gayly enough, the man watching her arrived at two
or three conclusions about her.

He was not a woman with a woman’s keen instinct to help him, yet it
came to Val most surely that there was a sore point in connection with
Hubert Kestridge and his wife even as there was about Christina, Lady
Wentworth.

Each time the name of Kestridge was spoken, Polly seemed to wince, and
Valentine all at once determined to say nothing of that letter from
Italy which had reached him the previous day.

He was not a particularly diplomatic person, as has been seen, yet his
tenderness and large sympathies gave him a certain tact that stood him
in good stead now.

He determined, therefore, to work what help he could give the lad
Harold in a roundabout sort of way.

He enticed Polly to tell him all about her brother, and the girl was
nothing loath to speak of Harold’s talent and many other endearing
qualities.

“It makes me a little sad,” she owned, wistfully, “to realize that
Harold is not to have the education our poor father intended him to
have. Of course, I am his sister, and so I suppose I am prejudiced,
but I call him ever so clever,” and then Polly sighed; “only he is not
strong.”

“Growing boys seldom are,” Valentine said in the most matter-of-fact
way.

He had caught sight of Polly’s eyes, and he saw they were full of
tears, but just at this moment Mrs. Pennington and her boy arrived, and
the little private conversation came to an end.

It needed no very great skill to read that Polly’s anxiety about her
brother was well founded. The boy had a very weak, wan look, and
Valentine felt a little pang in his big, strong heart as he looked at
him. He was an interesting lad, and above the average in intelligence.

Polly poured out tea, and fussed about her mother, and the while she
did this she was listening to the conversation carried on between
Harold and Mr. Ambleton.

Valentine discovered to his pleasure that he could be of definite use
to the boy. From the sketches produced he discovered that Harold had
more than a fair talent for designing, and with cultivation might turn
his talent in an architectural direction.

“You must come and stay with me a while,” Val said. “Will you spare
him, Mrs. Pennington?” he queried. “My sister will take great care of
him, and, I believe, I can find him some work.”

“Oh, mother!” Harold exclaimed in boyish delight, and Mrs. Pennington
murmured her pleasure in this arrangement.

As for Polly, she thanked Mr. Ambleton with her eyes, a matter that
afforded him considerable satisfaction, and in a little while Valentine
brought this visit to a close, and drove away, feeling that he had left
something very dear behind him.

Harold talked enthusiastically about his new friend all that evening,
and the thought of a visit to Dynechester, and the prospect of turning
himself from a schoolboy into the dignity of one who might soon be a
wage-earner, brought a glow of color to his pale face.

“I call him a brick!” he cried, as Valentine was discussed.

“He is much too big to be one brick,” said Polly, meditatively.

She was wondering if she could let Harold go on a visit without
supplementing his rather shabby wardrobe. Finally she determined that
they could not afford to indulge in any extravagance, and so on the
morrow she packed the boy’s school box, and wrapped him in sundry
flannels, and confided him to Valentine’s care.

“Don’t let him sit in a draught, and please send him to bed at ten, and
don’t keep him longer than you want. It is awfully kind of you to ask
him at all. You have made him quite happy.”

“I shall remember all your orders,” Ambleton said, meekly.

He thought he had never seen anything sweeter or more desirable than
Polly looked on this morning as she stood in the big doorway and waved
her hand in farewell to her brother.

“Now, Polly will go upstairs and have a good cry,” Harold informed him.
“Polly always cries when anybody goes away. She says she can’t help
herself.”

Polly did exactly as her brother foretold.

As soon as the door was closed she ran up to her little room and
indulged in a fit of weeping. She could not have explained why exactly,
but the feeling pressed on her that this visit Harold was about to make
would bring her some new sorrow, even while it promised so much that
was bright and pleasant. Valentine had enlarged his invitation.

“My sister will write to you in her own name; but I, on her behalf,
now beg that both Miss Pennington and yourself will come down and stay
with us also,” he had said to Polly’s mother. “We shall only wait
till we are quite settled before expecting you. It is not very gay at
Dynechester, but the place is so quaint I am sure it will interest you.”

Polly had answered for her mother.

“We shall be very glad to come,” she had said, briskly; “and we will
go,” she further informed her mother when Harold had departed, and
they were alone. “It will do us both good. I don’t know how you feel,
mother, but I need a little change of air.”

Mrs. Pennington did not answer immediately. When she did speak she had
a strained note in her voice.

“Dynechester is Christina’s home, Polly,” she said:

But Polly wore a defiant air.

“What has that to do with us? Christina may live in Dynechester, but
we need not trouble ourselves about her in the very least. I mean
henceforward,” Polly added, with a great deal more firmness than was
sincere. “I mean, my lovee, dear, to treat people just as they treat
me, and as Christina forgets us, so we must forget her.”

It was only on rare occasions that the names of either Christina or
Winnie were mentioned between them.

It seemed strange enough to Polly sometimes to look back and realize
in how short a time her two sisters had drifted out of her life.

She had a thrill of pity for herself in these moments—pity for
all those years of wasted love and admiration she had lavished on
Christina. That Winnie would be true to her own peculiar selfishness
Polly had always vaguely felt; but the way in which Winnie had
demonstrated this finally had exceeded all she had imagined on the
subject.

It was in truth a hard task for Polly’s virile loyalty to survey her
sister’s callousness with any great degree of philosophy.

She made a brave show to her mother of indifference, but the wounds
that both Christina and Winnie had made were too deep to be healed
quickly.

Nevertheless, though there would be pain both to her mother and herself
in this suggested visit to Dynechester, Polly determined they would go
when they were invited.

“I shall believe in the invitation when it comes,” she said, with
emphasis, as two days passed, and no letter reached them from Grace.
“I suppose Mr. Ambleton thought he was in duty bound to say that his
sister would like to see us. It was quite necessary for him to invent
something just to please us, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t think Mr. Ambleton looks as if he invented very much,” Mrs.
Pennington said, gently. She paused a moment, and then she added: “I
like this new friend of ours, Polly; I like him very much.”

Polly grunted.

“I don’t like anybody nowadays,” she said, turbulently. “I don’t
believe in anybody. I think the whole world is odious.”

At this Mrs. Pennington had to smile.

“Things are bad with you to-day, Polly,” was her remark.

Polly kissed her.

“I am in a downright bad temper, my darling mother. Just leave me to
myself, and I shall come round. Now, I am off marketing. Take care of
yourself till I come back.”

When Polly arrived home from her modest shopping, her mother handed her
two letters, with rather a triumphant expression.

“Harold is enjoying himself immensely, and Miss Ambleton writes so
charmingly. She wants us to fix our own time about a week or ten days
hence.”

Polly read through the letters.

Harold’s schoolboy effusion made her smile, but there was something in
Grace’s pretty letter that touched her.

“I am sure I shall like this girl,” she said, and then she began to
discuss ways and means. “You must take your smartest tea gown, and make
yourself ever so pretty, mother, dear one.”

“And you, Polly?”

“Oh!” with a shrug of her shoulders, “I am all right. I never look
magnificent, and I certainly shall not pretend to dress up smartly for
these people.”

“You see,” Mrs. Pennington ventured to remark, “you see, Polly, I was
quite right, Mr. Ambleton did not invent. I am sure he will be very
pleased if we go.”

“Oh! as to that!” said haughty Polly, “I shall wait a little longer
before I pass any opinion. He will have to pretend he is pleased,
whether he is or not. After all, we shall be his guests, remember.”

Mrs. Pennington took up the cudgels on Valentine’s behalf in real
earnest.

“Unless Mr. Ambleton were a very kind man, I am sure he would not have
asked Harold to stay with him. Come, Polly, you must confess that?”

“I won’t confess anything,” Polly cried. “I am a pig-headed person,
and when I think things—well, I think them, and there is an end of the
matter.”

“Under these circumstances, then, it will be better for us to refuse
Mr. Ambleton’s invitation,” said gentle Mrs. Pennington, with a smile
just flickering at the corners of her mouth, and, of course, Polly at
once combated this suggestion, and Mrs. Pennington’s answer to Grace’s
letter was a cordial acceptance of the invitation for herself and
daughter to spend a few days in Dynechester.

CHAPTER XII.

A TERRIBLE DESTINY.

Valentine had taken counsel with himself, and had resolved to say
nothing to his brother on the question of Sacha’s intimacy with Lady
Wentworth.

“After all, if Sacha does not see the matter with our eyes all the
speaking in the world will not alter things,” he said to himself. “It
is, of course, his own business to go where he likes and do what he
wants to do, and if he chooses to be a friend of Lady Wentworth’s,
I have no right to object. I should not give the business a second
thought but for Grace.”

Grace, however, quickly grasped the situation.

On her daily visits up to Sunstead, she had soon learned of Sacha’s
intimacy with Christina, and though at first she had felt a sharp
sensation of hurt that her younger brother should permit this,
remembering how she had fared at Christina’s hands, she very swiftly
found an excuse.

“Sacha is painting Lady Wentworth’s portrait,” she told Valentine.
“I am not surprised, she is a beautiful creature, and should make a
beautiful picture.”

Val assented to this quietly.

“I suppose Mark approves of this?” he said, half casually.

Grace colored.

It was not easy for her even yet to have to realize that her cousin was
on openly declared ill terms with them.

“Mark could find no reason surely to object. Sacha, after all, has not
offended him, if we have done so.”

A day or two later Grace spoke on this subject again.

“Mark and Sacha are quite friendly,” she told Valentine. “I saw them
walking together in the grounds this morning.” Grace paused. It was
evident she had something passing on her mind. “Val, have you seen Mark
lately?” was her query.

Valentine looked at her an instant.

“No,” he answered; “not for some weeks. Why do you ask, Grace? Is
something wrong with him?”

“He looks—terrible,” Grace said, in a low voice, pausing before the
last word. “Even at some distance, I could see that he is ill—he was
leaning on Sacha, walking slowly, as though he were in pain.”

Valentine knitted his brows, his pleasant face was overcast.

He answered his sister evasively.

“I expect Mark has been overdoing it. He is never strong. He treats his
constitution as if it were made of cast iron instead of being a really
poor affair at the best of times.”

Grace loitered in her brother’s rooms.

“I wish,” she began, half wistfully, and then she got no further.
Instead she spoke of Harold Pennington, who had been her guest for
several days, and whom she liked very much. “Will you be able to do
anything for him, Val?” she asked.

“He is young yet; but I think I can mold him to something. The boy is
certainly clever, but he strikes me as being dreadfully delicate.”

“Indeed, yes,” Grace said, thoughtfully. “I heard him coughing, oh! so
badly, last night, and I felt so tempted to go in and look after him,
Val. Does he not remind you a little of his sister, Lady Wentworth? To
me his eyes are just like hers, only softer. Is Miss Pennington at all
like Mark’s wife?”

“Not in the very least,” Valentine said, emphatically. “She has far
more beauty.”

Grace opened her eyes.

“Harold tells me she is the plain one of the family. I wonder if I
shall share your opinion?”

“Wait and see,” Val said dryly.

That same evening he spoke to his brother about Mark Wentworth.

“How is he going on?” he asked. “Is he keeping straight? I hear he is
looking very ill.”

Sacha shrugged his shoulders.

He affected a semi-picturesque attire in the evenings, a dark blue
velvet coat as a setting to his white shirt and tie, and diamond studs,
and though Valentine abominated this style of dressing, he was forced
to admit that his brother became it very well.

“Mark has gone his own gait too long to change easily now,” Sacha said.
He leaned back in his chair, and smoked his cigarette through a long
gold-mounted holder. “I think he is much about the same. I lunched
there the other day, and Mark drank his bottle of champagne like a man.”

Valentine frowned sharply.

“Why do you encourage him in this?” he asked, in his curtest way.

Sacha opened his handsome eyes.

“My dear Val, what have I to do with it? I am not Mark’s keeper.”

Valentine pulled away hardly at his pet meerschaum, and there was
silence between the two brothers till Sacha spoke again.

“Mark must drink himself to death,” he said, quite composedly. “It is
his destiny, and a man cannot go against his fate.”

“Don’t talk that kind of tomfoolery to me, Sacha,” the other man said
roughly. “Every man’s fate is to make the best of his life, and Mark
Wentworth started as clear as any of us. He is unfortunately placed,
and that is where his bad fate comes in.”

Sacha smiled faintly.

“You dislike Lady Wentworth very definitely, I see,” he said, and there
was a query in the words.

“I would rather not discuss her,” Valentine answered, and to end the
conversation he took up the evening paper that had just been brought up
from the station.

But Sacha, apparently, was in a talkative mood.

“Does it ever strike you, Val, that you are a prejudiced person? Take
this case of Lady Wentworth, for instance. What had this girl done that
should have set you so desperately against her? Of course, there is
open enmity between you now. I don’t see how you could expect anything
else under the circumstances; but what I don’t understand is, why you
should have worked to bring this enmity into existence.”

“I hardly think you would be nearer comprehension if I were to enlarge
upon the reasons that have actuated my attitude where Lady Wentworth is
concerned,” Valentine said, dryly.

Sacha shrugged his shoulders again.

“As I said just now, I repeat you are a very prejudiced person, Val.”

Valentine felt his temper rising.

“Look here, Sacha, let us drop this discussion. My opinion about Lady
Wentworth is a matter that concerns myself. If it had concerned you,
I take it, you would not have acted as you are acting. But that again
is a matter that is your own affair entirely. I prefer, myself, not to
speak any further about the establishment at Sunstead, and I regret
that I introduced Mark’s name at all.”

“Lady Wentworth,” said Sacha, slowly, “has gone over the whole subject
with me. She had charged me to explain to Grace that she had no kind of
animosity against our sister, that her cause of complaint is with you
entirely.”

But this was too much for Valentine. He rose and carried himself and
his newspapers to the drawing room, where Grace and Harold Pennington
were engaged in playing bésique.

“Is Sacha coming in to give us some music?” Grace asked, looking up
with her old, bright smile.

Her young guest had worked a beneficial effect upon her spirit.

“Polly will sing to you when she is here,” Harold hastened to say. “She
knows any amount of songs—old things, you know—‘Sally in Our Alley,’
and things like that.”

Valentine sat down and watched the game.

His angry feelings were gradually soothed as the moments went by, and
when ten o’clock struck and Harold rose obediently at Grace’s word and
left them to go to bed, Valentine was quite himself again.

“The boy looks better, Grace,” he said, as the door closed on Harold.

Grace paused before answering. She was putting away the cards and
counters.

“I don’t know what to think about him, Val. To-day we were in the post
office when Dr. Smythson came in, and while he was talking to me about
poor grannie, he was looking at Harold, and listening to his cough.
He asked me privately if the boy’s lungs had been sounded, and I said
‘No,’ because Harold remembers nothing of the kind. It was pouring with
rain when we left the post office, and Dr. Smythson insisted on driving
us home in his brougham. I could see,” Grace finished, slowly, as she
shut away the bésique box in a cabinet drawer, “I could see he thought
very badly of Harold. I do feel so sorry, Val. Would it be possible for
Mrs. Pennington to send the boy away for the benefit of his health—I
mean abroad, somewhere?”

Valentine deliberated a moment before he spoke. “It would not be easy,
but it could be arranged if it were deemed imperative. I hope, however,
you are mistaken, Grace. To me the boy seems better.”

Grace, standing in front of the fire, shook her head quietly.

“I shall be glad when his mother and sister come next week. I like him
so much; but, I confess, he is a little bit of an anxiety to me. The
house will be all cozy, I hope, by the end of next week, when my new
visitors arrive.”

“It looks delightful now—a real home,” Valentine said, but he spoke
abstractedly.

A little later on he inquired of Grace if she knew what Sacha’s plans
were.

“Is he going to stay down here much longer? Usually he does not honor
us so much,” he said.

Grace hurried to reply.

“Oh! I don’t want Sacha to go before Mrs. Pennington and her daughter
have come and gone. He can help to amuse them so well, and besides it
is right and proper that he should be here, Val. I am delighted he is
staying so long.”

“It certainly will not be right or proper that Sacha should be so
constantly at Sunstead while the Penningtons are here,” Valentine said,
grimly. “The situation will be a very unpleasant one, seeing that Lady
Wentworth ignores her mother and sister completely.”

Grace looked troubled, then her face cleared.

“I will speak to Sacha. He is so clever he is sure to arrange matters
well. I don’t want to send him back to London—we see him so seldom
nowadays.”

Grace kissed her big brother “good-night” after this.

“I don’t know why, but I feel so tired to-night, I am going to sleep
like a top.”

Grace was busy fulfilling this prophecy some two or three hours later
when a sharp knock on her door brought her out of her dreams, and made
her heart beat quickly.

“What is it?” she asked, and at sight of Val, standing in the doorway,
she felt her alarm deepen.

“Is some one ill?” she asked again.

“Put on some clothes, and come into the next room. The boy is very ill,
Grace. He came to me half an hour ago, frightened to death. He has
broken a blood vessel, and I am going for Smythson without any further
delay. I have done all I can to stop the hemorrhage, but I am afraid it
is beyond me. He is flat on his back, and, happily, I found some ice
downstairs, and I have put some on his chest. Just sit beside him and
keep him still. A little ice in the mouth occasionally.”

Grace hustled into her clothes, and went into the next room.

How long she sat listening to the labored breathing, and holding
the thin, weak hands in hers she never knew. It seemed years before
Valentine reappeared with the doctor behind him.

“We must send for his mother the first thing in the morning,” Grace
said, with pallid lips, as the night wore into dawn, and the three sat
anxiously round the bed.

Valentine went out when the morning came, and dispatched a telegram to
Polly.

He had worded it as carefully as he could, but he was only too well
assured that his message would carry desolation to her heart, and his
own yearned over her. He longed yet dreaded to see her, and when the
train came rushing into the station about noon, and he stood on the
platform to receive the slender, black-robed figure, with its eyes
strained with anguish, and all life and joy banished from the face, it
was with difficulty he restrained himself from catching her in his arms.

“I have come alone,” Polly said, in a hard, hoarse voice. “Mother is
ill in bed. I did not tell her all. She thinks I have come to see you
about arranging his business, poor boy! I had to invent something.
It would have killed her to come as she is.” She lifted her eyes to
Valentine’s face after this. “Harold is very, very ill. I know it—I
feel it,” she said.

Valentine bowed his head.

“He is very ill,” he answered; “but there is hope.”

Polly buried her face in her hands, and the brougham jolted over the
road.

“There is no hope,” she said, brokenly. “Oh! mother, darling, if only I
could have stood between you and this last sorrow!”

CHAPTER XIII.

HOPING AGAINST HOPE.

Harold Pennington passed rapidly from one alarming stage of illness
to another. He was in a high fever when Polly arrived to crouch down
by his bedside, and when the doctor came to pay a third visit in the
same day, his face alone conveyed to the girl how justly founded had
been her despairing cry that there was no hope. Hope, indeed, there was
none. The case proved most complicated. By nighttime the temperature
had risen still higher, and symptoms of pneumonia had developed.

Grace never left the other girl, and Polly turned to her as though they
had been friends all their lives. It was, indeed, in such moments as
these that Grace demonstrated her full beauty and wealth of heart and
sympathy. She had bitterly reproached herself at first with lack of
thought for the boy.

“I ought not to have taken him out,” she said to Polly, her eyes full
of tears. “I ought to have known that this cold weather would try him.”

“Don’t say these things,” Polly whispered. “It was bound to come. I
have felt all along that there was real danger to be feared in his
future, and if he were to be a sufferer all his life, I—I almost
rejoice that this has come. I grieve more for my mother now. He was her
baby. Oh! she loves him so dearly.”

As the hours wore away thought of her mother pressed most hardly on the
girl, and Grace hardly knew how to console her. In one of her quiet
moments with Valentine in the corridor outside the sick room, Grace
asked him how they should act.

“I can see that her heart is riven. She wants to spare her mother, and
yet the truth must be told, for,” Grace added, in a lower voice, “Dr.
Smythson fears the very worst. What can we do, Val?”

Valentine answered slowly that he should go himself to London and break
the news to the mother, and also bring down other advice.

“Smythson may be mistaken,” he said, but Grace shook her head.

“Alas!” she answered, “I don’t need Dr. Smythson, or any other doctor,
to tell me how poor a chance the boy has. Oh! Val, if only I had not
taken him out yesterday!”

Valentine drew his sister toward him and kissed her brow.

“You distress yourself needlessly, dear,” he told her. “This has not
come through any fault of yours. The boy was doomed to go, and go
quickly. I saw it the first time my eyes rested upon him.”

He changed the subject here, and spoke of Polly. He was full of
solicitude for the girl.

“Has she eaten sufficient food? Try and make her rest a little. Tell
her to remember how important it is that she should keep up her
strength. I want you to be very good to her, Grace.”

Grace returned his kiss.

She misread the meaning of those last few words, and took them to be
only the expression of anxiety for one who was his guest, even under
such sorrowful conditions, and Valentine did not enlighten her further,
did not tell her that the girl sitting, heavy-eyed, with a breaking
heart, beside her brother’s bed, was to him the sweetest, dearest
creature the world could hold.

It was so hard for him to stand outside the door and know that she was
within, fighting down so grim and terrible a grief. He longed to range
himself beside her, to take from her the weight and the burning anguish
of this moment.

At such a time his size, his great physical strength, seemed almost a
mockery. Of what use to be so big, so powerful, when he could not even
stand forward and protect one whom he loved from all sorrow?

Grace stole back into the silent room, and whispered to Polly her news.

“He will be with your mother in a few hours,” she said.

Polly thanked her softly, and turned her eyes from gazing on Harold’s
white face.

“Don’t let her come here. It may be cruel in one sense, but it is kind
in another. I want her to remember him as she has always known him, not
as he is now. He used to be such a pretty boy,” Polly said, slowly, as
if to herself.

She refused to leave his room even to rest for an hour.

“The time is short,” she told Grace. “It may be hours and it may be
only moments. I must be here in case he needs me. He has recognized me,
and just before you came I thought he smiled. I am not tired or hungry.
I only want to be with him.”

Grace left her reluctantly. Duties in the house claimed her from time
to time. Death may creep slowly up to the threshold, but life demands
attention incessantly.

There were many things Grace had to do.

Valentine was going to London. He must have luncheon, and Sacha, too,
did not quite understand why his home should be turned upside down for
strangers. All these mundane things fell naturally to Grace’s lot to
arrange.

In her hurry to see to Valentine’s comfort, she had not time to realize
the lack of sympathy that characterized Sacha’s attitude at this moment.

It, therefore, came upon her with a shock, a few hours later, when
Ellen, her faithful maid and helper, informed her that Mr. Sacha had
ordered her to pack a portmanteau, and then had been driven up to
Sunstead to remain there for the time being.

“Sir Mark wants me to paint his portrait also, and this is as good an
opportunity as any,” the young man had told the servant, as she obeyed
his orders silently. “And I am quite sure Miss Grace will be glad to
get me out of the house,” he had added.

Grace made no remark when Ellen brought her this information.

It shocked her sharply for a moment to think that the heart of her
younger brother could prove itself so insensible to the sufferings of
others, but almost immediately her love began to frame an explanation,
if not an excuse, of Sacha’s conduct. She translated his selfishness to
signify a desire to save her any extra trouble.

“He thinks he will be better out of the way, that with so much to do
in the house he will be only an additional worry. I am sorry he should
have gone without speaking to me first; and I am more sorry still he
should have gone to Sunstead, especially just now; but,” Grace added in
her thought, “it is hardly just to expect Sacha to quarrel with Mark
because Mark has quarreled with us. Will she come here?” was Grace’s
next thoughts. “Surely her hardness must give way at such a time as
this. Though I have no wish to come in contact with her again, I still
hope she will remember she is this poor boy’s sister, and that her
place is near him now.”

Unconsciously Grace found herself saying this to the old servant.

“And when Lady Wentworth comes, Ellen,” she said, “you must let me know
at once. This is not the moment to remember angry or hurt feelings.”

Ellen replied to this quietly and decisively.

“Lady Wentworth will not come, my dear,” she said. “She cares just as
much whether her brother lives or dies as the greatest stranger might
care. Sir Mark’s wife, Miss Grace, will only come to your house when
she can do or say something to make you uncomfortable, and that’s just
the plain truth.”

Grace flushed at this.

“I hope you are wrong, Ellen,” she said. “I should not care to think so
badly of Lady Wentworth, or any other person.”

“I hope I am wrong, but I know I am right,” Ellen said, with obstinacy;
then her voice changed as she talked of Polly.

“What a difference. Is it possible they can be sisters, Miss Grace?
Poor little creature, it makes my heart ache to see her face. She looks
very ill herself. I don’t think she is fit to sit in that close room,
but there’s no way of moving her. Is Mr. Valentine going to bring the
mother with him, Miss Grace?”

Grace shook her head.

“No; Mrs. Pennington is too much of an invalid. Valentine is going to
break the news to her as gently as he can. Miss Polly has entreated him
to prevent her mother coming.”

“I don’t see how he can stop her,” Ellen said, thoughtfully. “She may
be delicate, but it’s only fair and right she should come and look on
her boy before he goes. If I know anything of a mother’s nature, I
warrant you Mrs. Pennington will come back with Mr. Valentine to-night.
I had better prepare Mr. Sacha’s room for her in case I am right, had I
not?”

Grace sanctioned this, feeling that there was wisdom in Ellen’s
suggested preparation, though she hoped, as Polly did, that the mother
might not come.

This wish was doomed to be set aside unfulfilled.

That same night, very late, a cab drove up to the door, and Valentine
almost lifted out a fragile woman’s figure.

“She is quite exhausted,” he whispered in Grace’s ear.

Grace put her arms about Mrs. Pennington, and led her into the nearest
room, while Valentine followed, looking strangely white and worn.

“I fear I am not a good emissary,” he said, sorrowfully, to his
sister; “but when she pleaded to be allowed to come to her boy, it was
impossible to refuse her. Shall I go and tell Miss Pennington?”

Grace merely nodded her head. She had all her work cut out, she saw
at a glance, to minister to this poor, broken-hearted mother, whose
haggard eyes and frail look brought the tears in a hot flood to her own
eyes.

She had Ellen at hand to help her, and the two women vied with each
other in doing all their hearts could suggest to give some strength to
the overtaxed frame.

The journey from town, the cold and the aching anxiety had reduced poor
Mrs. Pennington to an almost fainting condition, and though her eyes
looked pleadingly into Grace’s face, she was forced by her weakness to
rest before going upstairs.

Valentine stood a moment watching her, then turned and went to find
Polly.

He went slowly. He felt truly that the sight of her mother so prostrate
with grief would be the last drop in the girl’s cup of sorrow, and once
again he felt his whole being go out in one despairing, eager desire to
stand between Polly and all grief.

As he mounted the stairs slowly he heard a slight noise ahead of him,
and looking upward he saw her standing at the top of the stairs.

Valentine could not have told how it was that he divined what news she
had to give. He knew nothing definitely but that he stood beside her,
holding her two small, cold hands in his.

Polly’s eyes were dry, but her voice was as hoarse as though she had
shed innumerable tears.

“It came so softly—the end,” she said, speaking slowly and with
difficulty. “There seemed to be no pain—only just one long, deep sigh,
and then another—and then—silence. I waited half an hour, thinking
it might be sleep, then I bent over him, and saw that he was indeed
asleep, and that he will never waken here again.”

Valentine pressed the trembling fingers in his. It was the first
time in his life that tears had shut out his sight. He conquered his
feelings with difficulty as he led her down the stairs.

“Your mother is here; she has need of you,” he said. It was the only
thing he could say.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE PORTRAIT PAINTER.

Sacha found his quarters up at Sunstead exceedingly pleasant. For some
reason or other Christina deigned to be most gracious to the young man.

Sacha, of course, had his own theory in connection with this
graciousness. Few women had aught but smiles for him, and Christina,
though beautiful, was, after all, only an ordinary woman. It was the
most natural thing in the world, he opined, that Lady Wentworth should
find pleasure in his society. Mark could scarcely be called an amusing
companion, whereas he, in his turn, apart from being attractive, had
more than a fair share of brains.

The portrait of Lady Wentworth progressed but slowly. Sacha knew his
own business very well.

“You are so difficult to paint,” he told Christina frequently, in those
days when he first took up his abode at Sunstead, while grief reigned
in his sister’s home.

“I always think that a doubtful compliment,” Christina said, languidly.

Sacha would have been sharply annoyed and surprised could he have
known all that was passing in his hostess’ mind, and how little real
satisfaction his presence gave her.

He felt it necessary to explain his implied compliment.

“One can paint ordinary people easily enough,” he told her.

Christina accepted this compliment in the spirit in which it was
offered, and so matters passed well between them.

Nevertheless, these days that Sacha spent so comfortably were none
too pleasant to Christina. She had heard of her brother’s visit to
the Ambletons with a faint degree of irritation, and naturally enough
imagined this to be a step on Grace’s part to annoy her, or to pay her
back in her own coin. For, however indifferent Christina was in reality
to her family, she did not intend or desire to let the whole world know
how matters stood. More particularly she did not wish the world of
Dynechester to know how poor was the estate of her mother and Polly and
Harold.

Harold’s visit, however vexatious as it was to herself, could be
explained, since Sacha told her that the boy was about to be trained
to his brother’s profession; thus, had questions been asked, there was
a satisfactory answer to them. Nevertheless, it had angered Christina
to know that there was this friendship between those she called her
enemies and her family.

Once or twice she had driven past Valentine and Harold, and she had bit
her lip sharply as her eyes had met the man’s steady, contemptuous gaze.

Sacha would have been vastly amazed could he have known that Lady
Wentworth bestowed so much thought on his brother, and more still had
anyone told him that she had far greater admiration for that brother’s
tall, splendid physique than for himself. It never entered into his
head to imagine that he was made so welcome at Sunstead because
Christina hoped to annoy Valentine by this friendship.

Popular as he was usually with all women, Sacha might freely be
forgiven for supposing he was welcomed by his cousin’s wife _pour ses
beaux yeux_, and not for so strangely ulterior a reason.

The truth was that Christina was furious with Valentine, not merely
for the part he had attempted to play in her life, but because he held
himself so coldly aloof from her.

It had not taken her long to learn in Dynechester what position it was
this man held, and how infinitely superior he was to the man she had
married.

She longed to subjugate Valentine, to fascinate him and rule him, even
as she ruled most other men with whom she came in contact.

Valentine was the first person who had punished Christina’s vanity, and
the woman, while she could never forgive this, never ceased to desire
a conquest of one who showed her so openly his complete indifference
mingled with his contempt.

That Valentine was so invulnerable to her spite was by no means a
satisfaction to Christina. She had been foolish enough to expect that
he would have declared some protest to her decree about the Dower
House—not, of course, for his own sake, but for his sister’s—and as
the time slipped by and he made no sign beyond installing Grace and
himself in their new house, her annoyance deepened.

Her will in connection with this uprooting of Grace from her old home
had been worked in open defiance of her husband. Mark Wentworth had
treated his wife to a pleasant half hour when he heard what she had
done.

He had a very special vocabulary that came into office when drink and
rage together claimed him for their own, and Christina had to submit to
hear herself abused in a manner that was a revelation to her.

The result of this scene was to increase her hatred of Grace, for
though she would have died rather than have confessed the same,
Christina was hotly jealous of Grace Ambleton.

It was not enough for Christina that Grace belonged to Valentine, and
sided with Valentine, of course, against herself. She was jealous of
Grace’s fine presence, and of her sovereignty in Dynechester, and
finally, to cap it all, she was jealous of Grace in connection with
her own family.

“Polly will, of course, fall down and worship her,” Christina had said
to herself with a sneer, when she had first heard of Harold’s arrival
at the Ambletons’ new house, and though she had done her best to
destroy all illusion in her younger sister’s heart, she hankered after
Polly’s lost enthusiasm simply because it was lost.

Thus it was that she worked to make things even for herself by having
Sacha about her as much as possible.

But, after all, it was a poor consolation to fight a one-sided battle,
and when Christina found that Grace accepted all she did in utter
silence, she began to be annoyed in another way.

“Harold must come and stay here,” she said to herself. “After all, Mark
is more powerful than Valentine Ambleton. He can do more for the boy’s
future. I shall write and tell him I expect him. It will disappoint
Miss Grace a little when she sees how quickly Harold obeys me.”

Unfortunately for Christina’s little plan, she had delayed writing to
her brother too long, and the day she would have sent to him, Sacha
brought the news of the boy’s sudden and dangerous illness. She would,
therefore, have to find some other path in which to parade her power
over Grace.

“If there is illness in your house, you had better come and stay here,”
she told Sacha, carelessly.

It was exceedingly dull up at Sunstead at these times. Mark, with an
outburst of characteristic obstinacy, had refused to invite anyone to
his house.

“The people I know well are not the sort of people you ought to know,
and all the rest of the world would go to the North Pole rather than
stay with me,” he had informed his wife with complete candor; “besides,
I don’t intend to have strangers here when poor grannie is so ill. Ask
your sisters, if you want anyone, and there is Sacha Ambleton to amuse
you. Grace is one of the few people I should like to see here, but, of
course, she won’t come now.”

In his heart Mark Wentworth was heartily ashamed of the warfare that
Christina waged against Valentine and his sister. The business of
the Dower House, in particular, was a sore remembrance with him, and
Christina was careful not to introduce the subject too frequently; not
because she was afraid of Mark’s temper, but because she had begun to
realize that, though she had posed as a power that must be obeyed,
Grace’s dignified acceptance of the situation robbed her of all she
desired to hold.

The news of Harold’s death placed Christina in a most awkward position,
and she hardly knew how to adapt herself to it.

For a long time she sat in thought, and the end of her musing was to go
to her husband and tell him what she wished to do.

“You must go to the house, I must be represented. I know perfectly well
Polly will want to treat me rudely, but I don’t intend to be treated
rudely. I consider the whole affair most objectionable. If my family
had wanted to come to Dynechester, I am the proper person to have
received them. As it is, I cannot go to your cousin’s house, so you
must go in my place.”

Sir Mark was in an obstinate mood.

“You don’t catch me going near Val—no, thank you!” he said, with
decision. “I don’t want any more rows. I am sick of quarreling. Very
sorry, Chris, but if you want anyone to go you must go yourself. I
can’t see, myself, why you need mix yourself up in these things now.
The boy is dead, and you can’t do him any good, and you haven’t been
too kind to your mother and sister, remember, since you have been my
wife.”

Christina tightened her thin lips.

“Mark, I wish you to go,” she said. She was more angry than she could
have described.

This was not the first time by many that her husband had let her see he
was growing tired of her tyranny, just as he was growing tired of her
beauty. Christina had never prized her husband’s infatuated adoration
of her, never wanted his love, but neither did she want to be so soon
dethroned.

“I wish you to go,” she repeated, but Sir Mark merely shrugged his
shoulders, rang the bell for another brandy and soda, and picking up
a sporting newspaper, threw himself into a chair, and dismissed the
subject.

Christina swallowed her anger as well as she could. She felt that
she was gradually being hemmed about by all sorts of unforeseen
disagreeables. For some indefinite purpose of her own she determined to
be associated with the somber proceedings at the house where Valentine
lived. To write to Polly was impossible, therefore she resolved to
write to some other person, and that other person should be Valentine
himself.

Her shallow, vain heart saw in this moment her chance of playing a rôle
with this man, whom she told herself she hated, but who, as a matter of
fact, was the one creature in the world whom she held in a place higher
than herself.

“I shall have nothing to do with Polly,” she determined. “I shall write
to him direct.”

And she kept her word.

An hour later one of the Wentworth grooms rode out of the grounds
bearing a letter to Mr. Ambleton. Christina had written curtly enough.

    “The present lamentable circumstances render it necessary that
    I should speak with you. Pray let me beg you to waive all
    objections you may have and send me word what hour you can most
    conveniently call upon me.”

“He will come, he can’t refuse,” she said to herself as she sealed the
letter.

Then she donned a black gown and went into the room set aside for
Sacha’s use as a studio.

She was strangely nervous and irritable, and Sacha found her far from a
pleasant companion.

He would have been amazed indeed could he have seen into Christina’s
heart, and read there the first tracings of a story destined to be
written in unusual and totally unforeseen lines.

CHAPTER XV.

A REBUFF.

The groom that carried Lady Wentworth’s letter from Sunstead to the
Ambletons’ house had been told to wait for an answer to the note
addressed to Valentine.

Christina found herself opening the envelope brought to her in her
own room an hour or so later, with a new sensation stirring in her
veins—that of an excitement that was strongly allied with doubt, and a
premonition of disappointment.

Her premonition was fully realized as she glanced at the few curt words
written in Valentine’s bold handwriting.

    “Mr. Ambleton regrets,” was all this letter contained, “that
    circumstances will prevent him from calling upon Lady Wentworth;
    neither does he see any necessity for an interview between
    himself and Lady Wentworth.”

Christina put the letter down on her table, and bit her lip sharply.

She found it a bitter fact to swallow that Valentine evidently had
determined to have absolutely nothing to do with her, good, bad or
indifferent.

Christina would have welcomed his anger, but not his indifference, and
she could not argue away the resolute tone of this letter, look at it
whichever way she might.

Had she sat down quietly and sorted out her feelings at this moment,
she must have been surprised at her attitude toward the man whom she
had told herself passionately, a hundred times, that she hated. She
might, moreover, have wondered not merely why, but how and when, she
had discovered that Valentine was not a man to be despised but rather
one to be desired?

Dynechester was not a very big world, but Christina had, up to now,
lived among small influences and powers, and this being the case she
was more susceptible to impressions than another might have been.

Like many arrogant, self-opinionated and selfish natures, Christina had
her sensitive points.

She had not known how true had been the basis of Valentine Ambleton’s
objection to her marriage till after she had become Mark Wentworth’s
wife. She had heard, of course, that Mark was supposed to be wild, and
that he drank more champagne than was good for him, but she had not
realized the disagreeables attached to his name, and the unenviable
reputation he had made for himself.

Her sojourn at Sunstead had quickly brought all this to her knowledge,
however, and with it had come the knowledge also of the high place
accorded to Valentine Ambleton and his sister by the very people who
openly despised and disliked her husband.

It was all very well to carry things through with a high hand, to
surround herself with the panoply of wealth, and endeavor to startle
the world about her with complete subjugation to her undoubted beauty.
Mistress, as she was, of the finest property anywhere near Dynechester,
Christina found herself absolutely neglected by the few good families
scattered about her neighborhood. No one called upon her, at least, no
one of any social importance, and the hot anger had surged many a time
in her heart when she had driven past the Dower House, and had seen the
carriages of these people, who had ignored her, standing outside Grace
Ambleton’s door.

“They are a set of Low Church prigs and frumps!” she said to herself,
by way of consolation; but this was not very satisfactory, and things
dragged on pretty heavily for her, until time and chance brought Sacha
Ambleton to her side.

But her success with Sacha counted for very little. Sacha, after all,
was a very ordinary young man, and his admiration a matter of course.

She had used him to aid her in the task of annoying Grace, because this
was the nearest way to touch Valentine, and because she had a restless
longing to bring herself in some form or other constantly before the
man.

But Christina wanted more than Sacha.

She told herself she would taste real happiness the day that Valentine
Ambleton should let her see that he recognized her power, and was ready
to do her homage. And she was by no means persuaded that this would
never come, not even when she sat biting her lip with vexation over his
curt refusal to obey her first summons. A woman of Christina’s caliber
has always a store of little tricks in reserve, on which she can fall
back in emergency, and she consoled herself now by this remembrance.

What would have delighted her more than all would have been the sight
of Valentine coming daily to her house as his brother came, not only
because his coming would give her personal satisfaction, but because
she was only too sure it would upset Grace altogether, and Christina
did not like Grace.

It was Sacha who gave her all the information about Harold’s death and
funeral.

The poor lad’s body was, at his mother’s request, carried away from
Dynechester, and laid in the same grave with his father.

Valentine held himself almost as a son to Mrs. Pennington in this
moment of new and acute grief. He did everything to spare Polly and her
mother.

“Val is in his zenith when he can be king over everybody,” Sacha said
many times to Christina, who affected to be much annoyed as well as
grieved over the proceedings of the moment.

“My mother is so weak, and my sister is worse than my mother. The
proper person to do anything for them just now is Mark, since Hubert
Kestridge is still abroad. Your brother is, of course, very kind to do
so much; but he is usurping my husband’s place all the same.”

“Oh! Val was bound to act for your mother,” said Sacha to this. “As
the sad event happened in our house, he could not let anyone else but
himself look to things; and, besides, Mark hates funerals, and is not
much good in an emergency, is he?”

Christina had flushed at this.

Sacha’s intimate knowledge of her husband was objectionable to her at
times. She might confess many things to herself, but she did not care
to have those same things told bluntly to her.

She made a parade of mourning, and kept herself shut up in the house
those few days that intervened between Harold’s death and the removal
of the body up to London.

She had made no further attempts with Valentine, but she had written
to her mother and had also written to Grace, offering herself in any
capacity. She received no answer to either of these letters.

Grace had indeed hesitated before she left Lady Wentworth’s letter
unnoticed; but Valentine had settled matters for her.

“Why bother your head about the woman?” he had said, almost
impatiently, when she had asked his advice. “Put the letter in the
fire.”

“It looks so rude, Val, to leave it unanswered, doesn’t it?”

Valentine shrugged his shoulders.

“Lady Wentworth has her own share of rudeness. She must be treated
occasionally as she treats other people. Besides, her writing to you
is all a farce. If she really cared two pins about her mother, or had
any grief at that poor lad’s death, she would not have waited and have
sent letters asking to be told what to do. She would have acted without
any delay or inquiry. Leave the letter unanswered,” Valentine said, a
second time, and Grace obeyed him.

She gave little thought to Christina, while poor Mrs. Pennington and
Polly were still under her roof, but when they were gone, escorted up
to their big, desolate, sorrowful home by Valentine, Grace had time to
remember Christina and to ponder on her anew.

Her late close intercourse with Polly only served to make the question
of Christina a more difficult one to grasp, yet Grace could not set
aside the thought that if one sister could be so unselfish and so
sympathetic, another might have her share of such qualities even if in
a very minor degree.

Grace recommenced her daily journeys up to Sunstead when her house was
empty.

She timed these visits to escape all chance of meeting Mark’s wife, and
she never saw Christina, but she frequently saw Mark, and gradually it
became Sir Mark’s custom to meet his cousin as she came down from his
grandmother’s room and exchange a greeting with her.

Grace could not but be pleased at this show of friendliness, and her
womanly heart yearned over the young man who was drifting so palpably
into premature age, and ill health, simply through his weakness.

They spoke of nothing confidential in these moments, but they both
found a pleasure in merely seeing one another as though nothing had
happened to make a breach between them.

It was, of course, not long before Christina became aware of the
fact that her husband was on good terms again with Grace. There was
a decided jealousy in Christina’s heart for her husband’s old boyish
affection for his Cousin Grace, and this renewal of good fellowship
between them annoyed her beyond all measure.

She took Sir Mark to task pretty sharply on the matter.

“Don’t you think it very odd that you should go out of your way to
be so amiable to Grace Ambleton, when you know that she ignores my
existence?” she asked him one day in her tartest tone.

And Sir Mark had answered her with a laugh.

“If it comes to that, how have you treated Grace, I should like to
know? Why, you have done everything you possibly could to make her life
miserable since you have come here. And why the deuce you should be so
down on Grace, I can’t see.”

“She is Valentine Ambleton’s sister, that is quite enough for me. I
hate him, and you know it!” Christina retorted, hot anger flaming in
her cheeks.

“Well, fight out your fight with Val, and leave Grace alone. You have
done your worst with her, now give her a little peace.”

It was Christina’s turn to laugh now, and she did so in her most
sarcastic manner.

“Which means that I am to submit to your friendship with her and take
no notice of her personal rudeness to me! Quite charming!”

Sir Mark had recourse to a shrug of his shoulders, and turned away from
his wife.

“If you don’t take care, Christina, you will be a d——d bore one of
these days,” was his remark, as he lit a cigarette.

Christina looked after his retreating figure with an expression on her
face that was not wholly anger. There was a touch of something like
pity in her look—the pity was for herself. She was, in truth, far
from being easily accustomed to the fact that already her power over
her husband was gone. Such a realization was too humiliating for her
to grasp all at once. She had made such a thorough conquest of Mark
Wentworth at the beginning that she may be forgiven for imagining her
sovereignty would be perpetual.

Her reign had, as a matter of fact, been short with Mark Wentworth.

Constancy was a virtue lacking in him altogether, and he had changed
his flirtations as easily as he had changed his garments. Marriage had
no more significance to the man than any of these former flirtations,
and he had only made Christina his wife because she was a clever woman,
and because Valentine had ventured to thwart him, and, by consequence,
had driven him to extremes.

Once married, Christina might have worked her influence beneficially
had she been so minded, but Christina cared not the toss of a button
whether her husband drank himself into an early grave or not. She cared
only for such things as concerned herself.

She could and did quarrel with Mark over matters that reflected on her
position as his wife, but as to what was good or evil to himself as an
individual Christina troubled herself not at all. True, she objected to
seeing him in a dazed, or maybe an excited condition, from the effects
of drink, but if he were ill afterwards she gave him no pity.

With all this, she had still imagined, up to quite a late date, that
she held her old place in his estimation, and when the moment came and
proved to her that Mark had as little concern for herself as she had
for him, she was simply mortified.

This mortification was the most disagreeable because it was impossible
for Christina not to see that where she failed another could succeed.

Her bitterness against Grace increased a hundredfold. If she could have
devised some means of letting Grace feel the burden of this bitterness,
she would have been happy. In this, however, as in all, she knew that
Valentine ranged himself between her and his sister; to reach Grace,
therefore, she must touch Valentine first, and to approach this man in
such a way as to satisfy at once her vanity and her hate, was the one
task that Christina set herself to fulfill, if possible, before many
more months had gone.

CHAPTER XVI.

A CHANGED HOUSE.

Valentine took upon himself to question Polly closely about her future
in the days that followed on poor Harold’s funeral.

“It is surely unwise to remain on in this big house all by yourselves,
is it not?” he observed one day, when Polly had told him her plans.

It was his last day in town. Though it would cost him a great deal he
was obliged to return to Dynechester.

“We must. We have nowhere else to go,” was Polly’s reply.

Val curbed the rush of words that would willingly have escaped his lips.

“Why not try to let or sell the house? It is so well situated you would
be sure to get rid of it, Miss Polly.”

Polly was obstinate, of course.

“I don’t mean to try, Mr. Ambleton. Mother loves this old house, and
she has so little left to her.”

“It seems so sad, so desolate,” Valentine said, gently. “I only thought
a brighter place might be better for you both.”

The house did, indeed, seem chilly and gloomy after his own bright
home. There was so much that was old and shabby in it. It seemed to him
a grave of hopes and joys, the last spot in the world to restore this
girl’s happy youth, and keep the courage in her brave heart.

“It is changed—oh! so changed!” Polly said, and there were tears in
her eyes and in her voice. “Only a year ago we were all together,
and things were bright enough then, even though poor daddy was just
beginning to speak of trouble coming. Now he is dead, and poor Harold
has gone, and Christina and Winnie are more lost to us than if they
were dead, too. Yet we don’t want to leave the old home, Mr. Ambleton;
indeed, we don’t.”

“But what will you do here? What life will you lead?” asked Valentine,
reluctant to cede his point.

“I want to be busy, and that is my difficulty,” Polly confessed.
“Sometimes I think I will start a school, and sometimes I wonder if
we could make money with a boarding house. Oh!” the girl said, with a
flash of her old self—“oh! I can see disapproval and doubt written in
every line of your face. Your sister would be much more sympathetic. I
wish you were more like your sister!”

“Do you find me unsympathetic?” Valentine asked, simply enough.

He was not conscious himself of the hurt tone in his voice.

Polly did not look at him as she said quite curtly:

“Very!” Then by way of mending things, she added: “You can’t help
yourself, you know. It’s your nature. You are so big, and big people
are never sympathetic.”

Val smiled faintly.

“According to you, Miss Polly, it’s rather a bad matter to be a big
person. I remember once you informed me that big people were always
conceited.”

Polly amended this.

“I did not say all big people,” she remarked.

“I appreciate your discrimination,” Valentine said, and with that he
rose to take his departure. “I feel I have no right to have touched on
these intimate questions,” he added. “Please forgive me. No doubt your
ideas about the house are far better than any I could suggest.”

“I think they are,” Polly answered him, evenly. “You see, I have gone