‘Don’t, Jane, you know it does concern her through companionship for Phyllis, and she was very kind.’
‘Oh yes, I can see her sailing in, magnificently kind from her elevation. But how in the world did she manage to pick up all this in the time?’ said poor Jane, tired and pestered into the sharpness of her early youth.
‘Dear Jenny, I wish I had said nothing to-night. Do wait till you are rested.’
‘I am not in the least tired, and if I were, do you think I could sleep with this half told?’
‘You said you knew.’
‘Then it is only about Gillian being so silly as to go down to Miss White’s office at the works to look over the boy’s Greek exercises.’
‘You don’t mean that you allowed it!’
‘No, Gillian’s impulsiveness, just like her mother’s, began it, as a little assertion of modern independence; but while she was away that little step from brook to river brought her to the sense that she had been a goose, and had used me rather unfairly, and so she came and confessed it all to me on the way home from the station the first morning after her return. She says she had written it all to her mother from the first.’
‘I wonder Lily did not telegraph to put a stop to it.’
‘Do you suppose any mother, our poor old Lily especially, can marry a couple of daughters without being slightly frantic! Ten to one she never realised that this precious pupil was bigger than Fergus. But do tell me what my Lady had heard, and how she heard it.’