"Oh, Karen!" said Miss Scrotton, who, drying her eyes, had accepted Mrs. Forrester's consolations with a slight sulkiness, "she hasn't given a thought to Karen, I can assure you."
"No; you can't assure me, Eleanor," Mrs. Forrester returned, now with a touch of severity. "I don't think you quite understand how deep a bond of that sort can be for Mercedes—even if she seldom speaks of it. She has written to me very affectingly about it. I only hope she will not take it to heart that they could not wait for her. I could not blame them. Everything was arranged; a house in the Highlands lent to them for the honeymoon."
"Take it to heart? Dear me no; she won't like it, probably; but that is a different matter."
"Gregory is radiant, you know."
"Is he?" said Miss Scrotton gloomily. "I wish I could feel radiant about that match; but I can't. I did hope that Gregory would marry well."
"It isn't perhaps quite what one would have expected for him," Mrs. Forrester conceded; "but she is a dear girl. She behaved very prettily while she was here with Lady Jardine."
"Did she? It is a very different marriage, isn't it, from the one that Mercedes had thought suitable. She told you, I suppose, about Franz Lippheim."
"Yes; I heard about that. Mercedes was a good deal disappointed. She is very much attached to the young man and thought that Karen was, too. I have never seen him."
"From what I've heard he seemed to me as eminently suitable a husband for Karen as my poor Gregory is unsuitable. What he can have discovered in the girl, I can't imagine. But I remember now how much interested in her he was on that day that he met her here at tea. She is such a dull girl," said Miss Scrotton sadly. "Such a heavy, clumsy person. And Gregory has so much wit and irony. It is very curious."
"These things always are. Well, they are married now, and I wish them joy."