"He seemed to refer to—Cheltenham?" she asked, smiling.
Cartmell was the embarrassed party to the conversation. "I—I'm afraid so, Miss Jenny," he stammered, and his red face grew even redder.
"Oh, I'll settle that all right," Jenny assured him.
"You'll give him the sack?" Cartmell asked bluntly.
She had many good reasons to produce against that, just as she had produced many for bringing him to Catsford. "I'll reduce him to order, anyhow," she promised.
That was what she wanted—to bring him to heel, not to lose him. But surely it was no longer for his own sake, nor even to satisfy that instinct of hers which forbade the alienation of the least of her human possessions? There was more than that in it. He was part of the scheme—he fitted into that explanation which my brain had insisted on conceiving as I walked home from Ivydene. Of this aspect of the case Cartmell was entirely innocent.
By one of her calculated bits of audacity—concealing much, she would seem to have nothing to conceal—she took me with her when she went down to Ivydene the next morning, to haul Powers over the coals. She would have me present at the interview between them. Well, it may also have been that she did not want too much plain speaking—or, rather, preferred to do what was to be done in that line herself.
She attacked him roundly; he stood before her not daring to resist openly, yet covertly insolent, hinting at what he dared not say plainly—certainly not before me, for he had not yet decided what game to play. He waited to see what he could still get out of Jenny. She rehearsed to him Cartmell's charges as to his conduct; its idleness, its unseemliness, the disrepute it brought on her and on the Institute. Somehow all this sounded a little bit unreal—or, if not unreal, shall I say preliminary? Powers confessed part, denied part, averred a prejudice in Cartmell—this last not without some reason. She rose to her gravest charge.
"And you seem to have the impertinence to hint that you can do what you like, and that I shall stand it all," she said.
"I never said that, Miss Driver. I may have said you had a kind heart and wouldn't be hard on an old friend." He had his cloth cap in his hands and kept twisting it about and fiddling with it as he talked. He smiled all the time, insinuatingly, yet rather uneasily, too.