“I don’t see how that can refer to me!”
Ellinor sprang to her feet as she spoke: the rector’s gurgle of amusement was the last straw to her patience. Angry humiliation dyed her face, her blue eyes shot flames.
“Oh, don’t explain, I can’t bear it! But please, dear aunt, please, don’t call me a turtle again! It’s the last thing I am, or want to be!”
She broke, in spite of herself, into laughter; laughter with a lump in her throat.
Parson Tutterville had been highly entertained. Mrs. Marvel was quite as agreeable to watch in wrath as in repose. But he was a man of feeling.
“I think, Sophia,” he said, in the tone she never resisted, “we will pursue the subject no further. However we may regret any interruption to the present satisfactory state of affairs, regret for David a visit that is likely to prove distressing, we cannot but agree with Mrs. Marvel that it is not her place to interfere.”
He rose as he spoke. The morning visit was at an end.
Even an encounter with Mrs. Nutmeg could not have left Ellinor in a more irritated condition.
“What do they all think of me?” she asked herself, and pride forbade her to shed a single one of the hot tears that rose to her lids.
“What have I done?” was the question that next forced itself upon a mind that was singularly truthful. She had placed herself indeed in a position open to comment and misinterpretation. And then and there she had given herself up so wholly, so unrestrainedly to love that she had actually come to measure the strength of her attraction for her unconsenting lover against the strength, or the weakness, of his will.