"Oh, there will be no need, Willy," she said with a short, nervous laugh. "No doubt Miss Frensham will do it instead of you."
Every one had stood up, by silent consent dissolving the meeting. Mrs Tonedale, Margaret, Willy, and the three or four visitors now looked towards Katharine again, wondering how she would meet Mrs Stanhope's parting thrust. She met it quite simply. She said:
"I will gladly warn him. Though I daresay he does not need to be warned. For at least Mrs Stanhope does not stab in the dark, does she?"
And directly she had spoken these words, she thought of the young boy, and a wave of sympathetic anxiety swept over her. Supposing that this woman did stab in the dark; supposing that out of mistaken loyalty to her dead friend's memory, she believed it to be a solemn duty to tell her version of the story to the young boy—Marianne's son—what then—what then? She was obviously such a bigot that she was capable of doing anything to forward the cause which she had at heart.
At that same moment Mrs Stanhope was saying to herself:
"The boy shall know—the boy shall know—it is only fair to my poor Marianne's memory that he should learn the true history of his mother's unhappy life."
The two women glanced at each other, and each read the other's thought. Then, after a hasty leave-taking, Mrs Stanhope hurried away. Katharine had an uneasy feeling that she ought to have followed her to her very door, and thus have made sure that Marianne's avenging colleague wrought no harm that afternoon to the boy and his father. She attempted several times to go, but was prevented by her friends, who wished to hear some of the details of her three years' travels.
"I believe you want to chase cousin Julia and give her a ducking in the Serpentine," said Willy. "By Jove, I should like to see it!"
Katharine laughed.
"Willy," she said, "you're really becoming quite electrically intelligent. What is the cause of it?"