‘I might call on her there before she goes home,’ suggested Gillian, seeing daylight.
‘You cannot be walking down there at dusk, just as the workmen come away’ exclaimed Aunt Ada, making the colour so rush into Gillian’s cheeks that she was glad to catch up a screen.
‘No,’ said Miss Mohun emphatically; ‘but I could leave her there at five o’clock, and go to Tideshole to take old Jemmy Burnet his jersey, and call for her on the way back.’
‘Or she could walk home with me,’ murmured the voice behind the screen.
Gillian felt with dismay that all these precautions as to her escort would render her friend more scrupulous than ever as to her visits. To have said, ‘I have several times been at the office,’ would have been a happy clearance of the ground, but her pride would not bend to possible blame, nor would she run the risk of a prohibition. ‘It would be the ruin of hope to Alexis, and mamma knows all,’ said she to herself.
It was decided that she should trust to Kalliope to go back with her, for when once Aunt Jane get into the very fishy hamlet of Tideshole, which lay beyond the quarries, there was no knowing when she might get away, since
‘Alike to her were time and tide,
November’s snow or July’s pride.’
So after a few days, too wet and tempestuous for any expedition, they set forth accompanied by Fergus, who rushed in from school in time to treat his aunt as a peripatetic ‘Joyce’s scientific dialogues.’ Valetta had not arrived, and Gillian was in haste to elude her, knowing that her aunt would certainly not take her on to Tideshole, and that there would be no comfort in talking before her; but it was a new thing to have to regard her little sister in the light of a spy, and again she had to reason down a sense of guiltiness. However, her aunt wanted Valetta as little as she did; and she had never so rejoiced in Fergus’s monologue, ‘Then this small fly-wheel catches into the Targe one, and so—Don’t you see?’—only pausing for a sound of assent.
Unacquainted with the private door, Miss Mohun entered the office through the showroom, exchanging greetings with the young saleswomen, and finding Miss White putting away her materials.
Shaking hands, Miss Mohun said—