‘A pleasing group, and so they were engaged on the spot?’ asked Merton.
‘Not she! She held off, and thanked her preserver; but she would be true, she said, to her lover in cocky. But before that Mr. Jephson had taken me into his confidence.’
‘And you made no objection to his winning your ward, if he could?’
‘No, sir, I could trust that young man: I could trust him with Barbara.’
‘His arguments,’ said Merton, ‘must have been very cogent?’
‘He understood my situation if she married, and what I deserved,’ said Mrs. Nicholson, growing rather uncomfortable, and fidgeting in the client’s chair.
Merton, too, understood, and knew what the sympathetic arguments of Jephson must have been.
‘And, after all,’ Merton asked, ‘the lover has prospered in his suit?’
‘This is how he got round her. He said to me that night, in private: “Mrs. Nicholson,” said he, “your niece is a very interesting historical subject. I am deeply anxious, apart from my own passion for her, to relieve her from a singular but not very uncommon delusion.”
‘“Meaning her lover in cocky,” I said.