Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/153

Rh Fortunately the truthful Amy did not feel called upon to make a reply. If she had said anything, it would probably have been that she really had not thought of cousin Joan during the stay of her visitors.

To make up for her negligence, she now moved about the room quietly, adjusting the blinds, arranging the pillows,  and doing everything that she could to make her comfortable. She also gratified the old lady’s curiosity by describing the girls who had just left, and she made her account so entertaining that cousin Joan was evidently gratified,  although she sniffed a little as if slightly scornful, and  said, “Brenda Barlow, Mr. Robert Barlow’s daughter! Oh, yes, it will only make you discontented to know people like that. You ’ll be wanting to do as they do, and you can’t. If I was your mother, I would n’t let you visit them. You can’t have a carriage and pair, and a yacht, and all those things.”

Amy, for a moment, was tempted to make some scoffing reply, but her second thoughts were better, and remembering that cousin Joan was shut out from most of the pleasant things of life, she hastened downstairs to prepare  the invalid’s tea; and when she and her mother had finished  their own evening meal downstairs, she returned to cousin Joan’s room to read to her for an hour.

Cousin Joan was an inheritance that Mrs. Redmond and Amy were hardly entitled to. She was a half-cousin of Mrs. Redmond’s father, and, to be perfectly frank,  Mrs. Redmond was not bound to her by any strong ties  of affection or gratitude. In her own girlhood, the mother