"Had you any sort of premonition of this, Paul?" Sue inquired in tremulous accents, an hour having elapsed since the letter came.
"She put one or two rather strange questions to me yesterday;" hesitated he.
"Might I ask--could you tell me what they were?"
"I think I would rather not. It can do no good now." He spoke gently, but she could not press the point.
"She knows;" said Paul, to himself. "How she knows I cannot fathom; but all this about the change in her feelings is only a blind. _She knows_; and though she has given me my release, I can never avail myself of it."
And this was now a story three months old, and Maud was coming to say "Good-bye" before beginning a new life in another land.
Heretofore she had obstinately rejected the olive branch held out by Sue. Sue, acting as mouthpiece for the three, had written time and again, begging that for all their sakes no estrangement should take place; entreating the delinquents to believe that they would only meet with kindness and affection in Eaton Place, where the sisters were established, and where room was plentiful. Would not Val and Maud come and make their home also there for the present?
But though the offer, delicately worded, might have been presumed tempting enough to two almost penniless people, it was coldly declined.
"And she seems as if _she_ were angry with _us_!" cried Sybil, "she who dragged the whole family through the mud, and left us to bear the brunt!"
"Certainly she does write as if she bore us a grudge," owned Sue, "and yet, how can she? What have we done? What has any one of us done that Maud should refuse to be one with us again? I am sorry, but of course if that is the spirit in which poor Maud receives overtures of peace, I really--really I do not think I can go on thrusting them upon her." For Sue also had her pride, though it was a poor, weak, back-boneless pride, which would have melted at the first soft word from her sister.
The emigration concocted in the club window, however, effected what all besides had failed to do. By the time the final arrangements were complete and the tickets taken, Maud, on the eve of departure, was won upon to come to Eaton Place, though she still declined to take up her abode there.