The newcomer stopped short upon the threshold.
"Anna! What tragedy has happened, little sister? No lights, no supper,
no coffee--and, above all, no Mr. Courtlaw. How dreary it all looks.
Never mind. Come and help me pack. I'm off to England."
"Annabel, are you mad? To England! You are joking, of course. But come
in, dear. I will light the stove, and there shall be some coffee
presently."
"Coffee! Bah!"
The newcomer picked her way across the floor with daintily uplifted
skirts, and subsided into a deck chair of stretched canvas.
"I will not rob you of your coffee, most dutiful of sisters!" she
exclaimed. "I have had adventures--oh, more than one, I can assure
you. It has been a marvellous day--and I am going to England."
Anna looked at her sister gravely. Even in her painting smock and with
her disarranged hair, the likeness between the two girls was
marvellous.
"The adventures I do not doubt, Annabel," she said. "They seem to
come to you as naturally as disappointment--to other people. But to
England! What has happened, then?"
Already the terror of a few hours ago seemed to have passed away from
the girl who leaned back so lazily in her chair, watching the tip of
her patent shoe swing backwards and forwards. She could even think of
what had happened. Very soon she would be able to forget it.
"Happened! Oh, many things," she declared indolently. "The most
important is that I have a new admirer."
The wonderful likeness between the two girls was never less noticeable
than at that moment. Anna stood looking down upon her sister with
grave perturbed face. Annabel lounged in her chair with a sort of
insolent _abandon_ in her pose, and wide-open eyes which never
flinched or drooped. One realized indeed then where the differences
lay; the tender curves about Anna's mouth transformed into hard sharp
lines in Annabel's, the eyes of one, truthful and frank, the other's
more beautiful but with less expression--windows lit with dazzling
light, but through which one saw--nothing.
"A new admirer, Annabel? But what has that to do with your going to
England?"
"Everything! He is Sir John Ferringhall--very stupid, very
respectable, very egotistical. But, after all, what does that matter?
He is very much taken with me. He tries hard to conceal it, but he
cannot."
"Then why," Anna asked quietly, "do you run away? It is not like you."
Annabel laughed softly.
"How unkind!" she exclaimed. "Still, since it is better to tell you,
Sir John is very much in earnest, but his respectability is something
altogether too overpowering. Of course I knew all about him years ago,
and he is exactly like everybody's description of him. I am afraid,
Anna, just a little afraid, that in Paris I and my friends here might
seem a trifle advanced. Besides, he might hear things. That is why I
called myself Anna."