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which seemed to threaten her own life with even greater dislocation than had happened to it already. 'I must have my time to myself!--freedom for what I want'--she thought to herself, impatiently, 'I can't be always looking after her.'
Yet of course the fact remained that there was no one else to look after Nelly. They had been left alone in the world for a good while now. Their father, a Manchester cotton-broker in a small way, had died some six months before this date, leaving more debts than fortune. The two girls had found themselves left with very small means, and had lived, of late, mainly in lodgings--unfurnished rooms--with some of their old furniture and household things round them. Their father, though unsuccessful in business, had been ambitious in an old-fashioned way for his children, and they had been brought up 'as gentlefolks'--that is to say without any trade or profession.
But their poverty had pinched them disagreeably--especially Bridget, in whom it had produced a kind of angry resentment. Their education had not been serious enough, in these days of competition, to enable them to make anything of teaching after their Father's death. Nelly's water-colour drawing, for instance, though it was a passion with her, was quite untrained, and its results unmarketable. Bridget had taken up one subject after another, and generally in a spirit of antagonism to her surroundings, who, according to her, were always 'interfering' with what she wanted to do,--with her serious and important occupations. But these occupations always ended by coming to nothing; so that, as Bridget was irritably aware, even Nelly had ceased to be as much in awe of them as she had once been.
But the elder sister had more solid cause than this for dissatisfaction with the younger. Nelly had really behaved like a little fool! The one family asset of which a great deal might have been made--should have been made--was Nelly's prettiness. She was very pretty--absurdly pretty--and had been a great deal run after in Manchester already. There had been actually two proposals from elderly men with money, who were unaware of the child's engagement, during the past three months; and though these particular suitors were perhaps unattractive, yet a little time and patience, and the right man would have come along, both acceptable in himself, and sufficiently supplied with money to make everything easy for everybody.
But Nelly had just wilfully and stubbornly fallen in love with this young man--and wilfully and stubbornly married him. It was unlike her to be stubborn about anything. But in this there had been no moving her. And now there was nothing before either of them but the same shabbiness and penury as before. What if George had two hundred and fifty a year of his own, besides his pay?--a fact that Nelly was always triumphantly brandishing in her sister's eyes.
No doubt it was more than most young subalterns had--much more. But what was two hundred and fifty a year? Nelly would want every penny of it for herself--and her child--or children. For of course there would be a child--Bridget Cookson fell into profound depths of thought, emerging from them, now as often before, with the sore realisation of how much Nelly might have done with her 'one talent,' both for herself and her sister, and had not done.
The sun dropped lower; one side of the lake was now in shadow, and from the green shore beneath the woods and rocks, the reflections of tree and crag and grassy slope were dropping down and down, unearthly clear and far, to that inverted heaven in the 'steady bosom' of the water. A little breeze came wandering, bringing delicious scents of grass and moss, and in the lake the fish were rising.
Miss Cookson moved away from the window. How late they were! She would hardly get home in time for her own supper. They would probably ask her to stay and sup with them. But she did not intend to stay. Honeymooners were much better left to themselves. Nelly would be a dreadfully sentimental bride; and then dreadfully upset when George went away. She had asked her sister to join them in the Lakes, and it was taken for granted that they would resume living together after George's departure. But Bridget had fixed her own lodgings, for the present, a mile away, and did not mean to see much of her sister till the bridegroom had gone.
There was the sound of a motor-car on the road, which ran along one side of the garden, divided from it by a high wall. It could hardly be they; for they were coming frugally by the coach. But Miss Cookson went across to a side window looking on the road to investigate.
At the foot of the hill opposite stood a luxurious