Before they parted she broached a scheme which she had been planning in secret, and, having received a willing consent, bided her opportunity to lay it before the invalid herself. It came at last one chilly afternoon, when Evie was laid on a sofa before the fire, as a sign that convalescence had really begun. The knee was still bound up, as it was not proposed that she should attempt to walk until the journey home had been accomplished, and it was on this subject that Evie made her first remark.
"I suppose," she began, looking at Mrs Chester with the brown eyes which had grown so pathetic in their gaze in the last few weeks, "I suppose I can travel now, as soon as it can be arranged. I shall have to be carried about at each of the changes, and it must be planned ahead in this busy season. I must speak to Miss Bruce, and ask her what I had better do."
Mrs Chester bent forward and poked the fire in a flurried, embarrassed manner; she knitted her brows, and her rosy face grew a shade deeper in colour.
"Er--yes," she assented vaguely. "Of course; but Evie, dear, I have been waiting to talk to you about something which has been very much on my mind lately. We are leaving on Thursday, Rhoda and I, and are having a through carriage and every possible appliance to make the journey easy, and I thought that it would be so much simpler for you, dear, to travel with us, and spend a few weeks at the Chase before going home!"
Evie smiled, with the languid courtesy with which an invalid listens to an impossible proposition.
"It is very kind of you," she said. "Some day I shall be glad to come, but not at present, thank you. I am not well enough to pay visits."
"But my child, it would not be like an ordinary visit; you should do exactly as you would in your own home--stay in bed, or get up, as you pleased, and make out your own programme for the day. You know me now, and can surely understand that you need feel no ceremony in coming to my house."
"No, indeed! You have been so kind to me all this time, that I should be ungrateful if I did not realise that. I would rather be with you than anyone else outside my own family, but--but--" the tears gathered and rolled down the pale cheeks--"Oh, surely you understand that just now I want to be at home with my own mother and father!"