"What heresy," cried his listener, indignantly.
"Besides, you know, I—was once—in love with another girl."
"Oh, yes; but that was twelve years ago," said his listener, quickly; "she is no girl now. You cannot pretend you have not got over that. We all know that men's hearts, like crabs' claws, grow again."
"What heresy," he repeated, with a laugh; "but, come, Mrs. Gordon, let us be serious. Surely you can suggest some nice retired family in a hill station who would receive Angel? I'll allow her four hundred a year—a family with girls preferred."
"No," she replied; "for although Mrs. Flant's hints are abominable falsehoods, her lie has had three weeks' start. Whilst you have been absent it has been travelling rapidly, and growing like a snowball. How are you to overtake it? and what family of girls would receive a young woman—with a—story?" The lady's methods were cruel, but it was all for the good of the subject, and his ultimate happiness; the end justified the means. "Angela's name has been bandied about; you must change it from Miss to Mrs."
"I'll be——" he began, and pulled himself up. "I shall go straight off to Mrs. Flant, and cram her words down her throat, and make her eat them. If she were a man, I declare, I would flog her. What is her tale?"
"Merely a hill idyll—which she discovered one stormy evening."
"But Angel came out in the Arabia; she had only the start of Mrs. Flant by about one hundred moments, and there are two hundred witnesses to prove it."
"True, but if you make a stir, you stir up mud," was Mrs. Gordon's damping rejoinder. "You will make matters worse. At present, talk is confined within a certain limited radius; surely you don't wish Angel to be the talk of India?"
Here came Angel running, in a flowing, white gown, with a note in her hand. She was accompanied by two frolicking puppies, and looked like the spirit of youth.