Here came Amy herself, sent up to say that the trap was ready, and her aunt must not be late for the train. She felt as if the last protection was gone when she saw her aunt and cousin driven away in the conveyance they had hired at Ellerby.
Girls bred up like Florence Cray would have thought it all a great fuss about nothing. First and last Florence had seen nothing but fun in Amy's cheating her strait-laced aunts and getting a little diversion, while they wanted to shut her up with a cross child; but Amy had been bred up to a very different way of looking at things, and the whole afternoon had only been setting more fully before her how she had fallen from what she had imagined of herself last Lent!
After all, the delay had made it better for her. Aunt Rose did not tell the story quite so hotly and violently as it would have come out in the first shock of wrath, but it was dreadful enough to hear her father say—
"Amy, child, what is this? I never thought you would go for to do such a thing."
"You that we had trusted from a baby," added Aunt Rose.
Aunt Charlotte said nothing, but her looks were the worst of all to bear, they were so gentle and so sorrowful. And when Amy had sobbed out her story they told her that she had been so sly that they did not know how to believe her word.
"Oh, father! you may believe me. I never told a story—no, I never did!"
"And yet you could make as if you were going day by day to sit with that poor little chap, only that you might be tramping about the lanes with that there scamp!"
It was what he took as the hypocrisy of the thing that chiefly wounded Mr. Lee, and when Amy declared she had always gone into the cottage and spoken to the boy, she was told, "Much she could have attended to him, since she had never seen that the poor child was dying."
The fact was that Florence had hurried her a good deal, because Mr. Wingfield was to show them the rosettes the horses were to wear on the wedding-day.