‘Oh yes, I always ask him, as you told me; but he is awfully slow and mopy and down in the mouth to-day. Stebbing says he is sweet upon Gill; but I told him that couldn’t be, White knew better. A general’s daughter, indeed! and Will remembers his father a sergeant.’
‘It is very foolish, Fergus. Say no more about it, for it is not nice talk about your sister.’
‘I’ll lick any one who does,’ said Fergus, bumping his stone up another step.
Poor Aunt Jane! There was more to fall on her as soon as the door was finally shut on the two rooms communicating with one another, which the sisters called their own. Mrs. Mount’s manipulations of Miss Adeline’s rich brown hair were endured with some impatience, while Miss Mohun leant back in her chair in her shawl-patterned dressing-gown, watching, with a sort of curious wonder and foreboding, the restlessness that proved that something was in store, and meantime somewhat lazily brushing out her own thinner darker locks.
‘You are tired, Miss Jane,’ said the old servant, using the pet name in private moments. ‘You had better let me do your hair.’
‘No, thank you, Fanny; I have very nearly done,’ she said, marking the signs of eagerness on her sister’s part. ‘Oh, by the bye, did that hot bottle go down to Lilian Giles?’
‘Yes, ma’am; Mrs. Giles came up for it.’
‘Did she say whether Lily was well enough to see Miss Gillian?’
Mrs. Mount coughed a peculiar cough that her mistresses well knew to signify that she could tell them something they would not like to hear, if they chose to ask her, and it was the younger who put the question—
‘Fanny, did she say anything?’