Letty thought she had never seen anything so dainty, though her experienced eye could detect the fact that nothing had really cost money. As an opening to the career on which she had embarked the setting was unexpected, while the method of her treatment was bewildering. In the black recesses of her heart Miss Henrietta Towell might be hiding all 315 those feline machinations which Mrs. Judson Flack had led Letty to believe a part of the great world’s stock-in-trade; but it couldn’t be denied that she hid them well. Letty didn’t know what to make of it. “There’s quite a trick to it,” Steptoe had warned her; but the explanation seemed inadequate to the phenomena.
Sipping her coffee and crunching her toast she was driven to ponder on the ways of wickedness. She had expected them to be more obvious. All her information was to the effect that an unprotected girl in a world of males was a lamb among lions, a victim with no way of escape. That she was a lamb among lions, and a victim with no way of escape, she was still prepared to believe; only the preliminaries puzzled her. Instead of being crude, direct, indelicate, they were subtle and misleading. After twenty-four hours in Miss Towell’s spare room there was still no hint of anything but coddling.
“You see, my dear,” Miss Towell had said, “if I don’t nurse you back to real ’ealth, him that gave you the thimble might be displeased with me.”
It was not often that Miss Towell dropped an h or added one; but in moments of emotion early habit was too strong for her.
Coming into the room now, on some ermine’s errand of neatness, she threw a glance at Letty, and said: “You don’t look like a Rashleigh, do you, dear? But then you never can tell anything about families from looks, can you?”
It was her nearest approach as yet to the personal, and Letty considered as to how she was to meet it. “I’m not a Rashleigh—not really—only by—by marriage. 316 Rashleigh isn’t my real name. It’s—it’s the name I’m going by in pictures.”
“Oh!”
Miss Towell’s exclamation was the subdued one of acquiescence. She knew that ladies in pictures often preferred names other than their own, and if Letty was not a Rashleigh it “explained things.” That is, it explained how anyone called Rashleigh could be wandering about in this friendless way, though it made ’Enery Steptoe’s intervention the more mysterious. It was conceivable that he might act on behalf of a genuine Rashleigh, however out at elbow; but that he should take such pains for a spurious one, and go to the length of sending the sacred silver thimble as a pledge, rendered the situation puzzling.
Schooled by her religious precepts to taking her duties as those of a minute at a time Miss Towell made no effort to force the girl’s confidence, and especially since Letty, like most young people in trouble, was on her guard against giving it. So long as she preferred to be shut up within herself, shut up within herself she should remain. Miss Towell felt that, for the moment at least, her own responsibility was limited to making the child feel that someone cared for her.
At the same time she couldn’t have been a lonely woman with a love-story behind her without the impulse to dwell a little longingly on the one romantic incident in her experience. Though it had never come to anything, the fact that it had once opened its shy little flower made a sweet bright place to which her thoughts could retire.