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
