Zella looked timidly at her father.
"Do as you like, pauvre mignonne." But, in spite of the old term of endearment, he was not thinking very much about her.
The next day Zella thought that she would have given everything in the world not to be going away from Villetswood. But, with the new cowardice that seemed to have taken possession of her, she did not dare to change her mind.
She said good-bye, crying, to the maids who had been so kind to her, and ran sobbing upstairs at the last moment to seek the room which had been her mother's. But Mrs. Lloyd-Evans met her on the stairs, and said:
"Where are you going, darling? The carriage is at the door, and we must start in a minute."
Zella felt that her aunt's voice held the slightest possible tinge of disapproval, and she instinctively choked back her tears.
"I have forgotten something—in my room," she gasped.
"Then fetch it quickly, dear, while I wait for you." Mrs. Lloyd-Evans stood, inexorable, on the stairs. Zella ran into her own room, slamming the door to behind her, and stood for a moment looking half wildly round her, blinded with tears, and shaking with pain and a sort of senseless, unreasoning rebellion, against what or whom she hardly knew. She only knew that it had become impossible for her to go to her mother's room. She felt that she hated Aunt Marianne, that she was going away with her, and that nobody would ever understand or comfort her any more. She wrung her hands with a mad, foreign gesture.
The strange minute of agony passed, and Zella went downstairs with her hand clasped in Mrs. Lloyd-Evans's black-gloved one.
Louis de Kervoyou was in the hall.
Zella did not hear his low, rapidly spoken thanks and farewell to Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. She looked round her, at the familiar oak staircase, the pictures hung upon the walls, the pieces of furniture she had known all her life. With a child's sense of finality, she felt as though she must be leaving Villetswood for ever.
"Adieu, mignonne!"
Mrs. Lloyd-Evans was getting into the carriage now.
"Papa," said Zella, clinging to him.
He looked at her compassionately.
"I'm not going away for always—you'll let me come back?" she gasped, almost inarticulate.
"Whenever you like, of course, my poor little angel!" cried Louis vigorously, in tones more like his own than any Zella had yet heard from him since her mother's death.
"Write to me the very day and moment you want to come home, and you shall come."
The reassuring words and the kiss he gave her brought a feeling of warmth to Zella's heart. It was like a return to the old familiar atmosphere of petting and security, to which she had been accustomed all her life.
IV
"TIME is a great healer " was a platitude that very much recommended itself to Mrs. Lloyd-Evans. It gave, as it were, a sanction to a sort of modified forgetfulness, and to the resumption of everyday interests and occupations!
"Time is a great healer," thought Zella after a fortnight in the house at Boscombe, when she was anxiously taking her own spiritual temperature, and wondering miserably if it was heartless and forgetful not to cry in bed every night, as she had done at first after her mother's death.
But Aunt Marianne did not now encourage crying, and scarcely ever spoke of Zella's mother. Only on the rare occasions when Zella was introduced to visitors did she hear a subdued murmur of " my dear sister's only child— poor Esmée, you know ;" and then she would move out of hearing, acutely conscious of the pathos of her own deep mourning and of the visitor's compassionate glances.
James and Muriel Lloyd-Evans had at first been rather overawed by Zella's black frock. In a few days, however, the old relations between the cousins were resumed. James at sixteen still bore unmoved the reputation of being a prig. A species of civil taciturnity was his habitual shield for an intense sensitiveness, of which Zella, precociously intelligent, was already more than half aware. Muriel, pretty, kind-hearted, essentially unimaginative, thought that she and Zella must be great friends because they were first cousins and of the same age. It was very sad that poor Aunt Esmée had died, and it was very dreadful for poor Zella; but it was very nice to think that she could pay them a long visit and share Muriel's lessons with Miss Vincent when the holidays were over.
Zella did not like Muriel, whom she often heard spoken of as "such a nice, bright, unaffected little girl." Zella, almost unawares, felt that praise of Muriel was an oblique reflection upon herself, because they were so different. Muriel did not want to read story-books, as Zella did, but liked long walks and outdoor games, and the care of pet animals. She also possessed accomplishments, which Zella did not, and could do skirt-dancing very prettily, and sometimes played Thome's "Simple Aveu " on her violin before visitors. Zella, who would have been very willing to display accomplishments on her own account, could do nothing except talk French; and even then Muriel's schoolroom lingua franca was apparently supposed by everyone to be on the same level as Zella's finished Parisian accent.
Zella, though not humble-minded, began for the first time to mistrust herself. She was humiliated at her own lack of superiority. Yet in her heart she considered Muriel stupid, and despised her because she never read a book and possessed a limited and childish vocabulary. James .was not stupid. He yearly brought back a pile of prizes from school, and was known to have passed examinations brilliantly. But Zella admitted to herself, with some naive surprise, that she did not understand James, nor appear to have much in common with him.
It seemed to her that he had been nicer as a solemn little boy at Villetswood, when they had played imaginative games together from the "Arabian Nights," always leaving out an invariably tearful Muriel because she did not know how to "pretend."
James nowadays took little notice of Zella's existence, and she unconsciously resented it. He spent his days over a book whenever his mother was not within sight, and one day, about a fortnight after her arrival, Zella said to him rather wistfully: "Are you fond of reading? I like reading better than anything."
James raised his head from his book. His dark, melancholy face resembled that of his father, but the brow bore the unmistakable stamp of intellect.
"I like it," he said slowly.
"What is your book? May I see? Oh, 'Lorna Doone.' "
"Have you ever read it?"
Zella had not, but she had once heard it discussed at Villetswood, and was at no loss.
"Why, it's the Devonshire story," she said rather proudly, "and, of course, I am from Devonshire."
Zella sometimes thought of herself as a Devonshire maid, sometimes as the loyal descendant of a titled French family, and sometimes as a widely travelled, rather Bohemian young cosmopolitan.
"Did you like it?" asked James.
"Yes. Girt Jan Ridd has always been a hero of mine, and I like Lorna too," replied Zella glibly.
"I like Tom Faggus and his Winnie better. I've just come to where he's wounded, and she comes to look for help."
"Yes, that's splendid!"
Had Zella stopped there, all would have been well; but she was determined to prove her familiarity with the world of literature, and with "Lorna Doone" in particular. She continued pensively:
"But I think that Lorna is really a more attractive character than Winnie, on the whole."
James looked at her rather oddly.
"Do you remember the book well?" he asked at last.
"Not very," hesitated Zella, suddenly unsure of herself. "I read it a long while ago."
"But you remember Winnie?"