I meditated while poor Mollie dried her eyes, to which the irrepressible tears had risen. “Ask him if he can’t arrange for you to see more of her,” I said presently.
She looked at me with a general trust, yet a particular scepticism.
“But she will make that seem as if I were trying to force myself on them; because she’s always with him, isn’t she?” “Only now because she keeps him, not because he wants to stay. I’m quite sure that he wants to be more with you. I think you can manage it, Mollie. Just say, when he next urges: 'Oh, but I’d love to, Clive. Only you must tell me when. Perhaps sometime you’d take me to the dream-garden when you think she’ll be there and that she’d care to have me, and then, when you get us started, you could leave us. You could go and take Judith for a stroll.' Something of that sort.”
She eyed me sadly and doubtfully.
“I’ll try whatever you tell me to try, but I feel afraid of her. I feel as if she cared, really cared, to do me harm.”
“She’s been proved wrong,” I said, “and I’ve rather rubbed it in; but at the worst, Mollie, she can never harm you now as there was danger of her doing. It’s better, far better, you’ll own, for your husband to think you’re jealous and a naughty angel than for him to think you’re a second-rate one.” With this aphorism, for the time being, she had to be contented. I myself felt sure that the hour of reckoning was to come.
It was next afternoon, after lunch, Vera being engaged in the drawing-room with visitors, that I met Captain Thornton on the lawn with his wife. Mollie was very large-eyed and rather pale, and I inferred from her demeanour that she had taken a step or made a move of some kind.
“Do come with us, Miss Elliot,” said Captain Thornton. “I’m just taking Mollie along to the dream-garden. She wants to have a little talk, all to herself, with Lady Vera, and Lady Vera told me to wait for her there till these people were gone; so it’s just the thing. And you and I can leave them together, do you see? People never get really to know each other unless they are alone together, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” I replied. “Though sometimes they never get to know each other when they are alone together,” I couldn’t resist adding; but as I saw a slight bewilderment on his honest face I indulged in no further subtleties, and made haste to add, “Does Vera know that you were going to arrange a meeting?”
“Oh, not a bit of it. That’s just the point,” said the guileless young man. “I want her to think that it’s all Mollie’s doing, you know; because she’s got it into her head that Mollie doesn’t really care about her. Funny idea, isn’t it? As if Mollie could be like that to any one who’s been as kind to us as Lady Vera has! But I’m sure that if they have a few quiet talks it will all come right. Mollie is so undemonstrative; I told her that. It needs time for her to get used to anybody.”