Page:Leah Reed--Brenda's summer at Rockley.djvu/231

Rh Although Brenda’s rendering of the news was a trifle incoherent, Nora and Julia soon had a more connected account of Agnes’s prospects from Mrs. Barlow. The engagement was not exactly a surprise to Mr. and Mrs. Barlow, as they had had much correspondence regarding it with their daughter and Ralph Weston, her fiancé. They had heard such good reports of him from their old friends,  the Waterfords, in whose care Agnes had been during her  year in Paris, that, without seeing the young man, on the  strength of his letters, they had given their consent. Yet to Brenda the engagement was news, and perhaps if she  had known how many letters had passed between Rockley  and Paris on the subject of this engagement, she might  have felt a little hurt that she had been left out of the  family consultations.

But now in all the plans for the wedding, Brenda was allowed to have something to say, and perhaps in the  excitement of making her plans, she forgot that by her marriage her sister was to be removed from her even  farther than she had been during the past year.

“For when she goes back to Europe, it is to be for three or four years,” she said to Nora, “and I shall really be  Miss Barlow. Yet it’s strange, is n’t it, that although I used to think that would be the most delightful thing in  the world, I feel quite blue at the thought of losing  Agnes.”

“Perhaps you ’ll go to Paris to visit her.”

“Oh, perhaps, but still it will seem very melancholy to have her going off to leave us. I did n’t feel the same