“Nothing!” and Ermine indulged in a fit of laughter at his discomfiture, so comical that he could not but laugh himself, as he said, “Ah! the pleasure of disappointing me quite consoles you.”
“No; the proof of the discretion of womanhood does that! You thought, because she tells all her troubles to you, that she must needs do so to the rest of the world.”
“There is little difference between telling you and me.”
“That’s the fault of your discretion, not of hers.”
“I should like to know who has been annoying her. I suspect—”
“So do I. And when you get the confidence at first hand, you will receive it with a better grace than if you had had a contraband foretaste.”
He smiled. “I thought yours a more confidence-winning face, Ermine.”
“That depends on my respect for the individual. Now I thought Lady Temple would much prefer my looking another way, and talking about Conrade’s Latin grammar, to my holding out my arms and inviting her to pour into my tender breast what another time she had rather not know that I knew.”
“That is being an honourable woman,” he said, and Rose’s return ended the exchange of speculations; but it must be confessed that at their next meeting Ermine’s look of suppressed inquiry quite compensated for her previous banter, more especially as neither had he any confidence to reveal or conceal, only the tidings that the riders, whose coalition had justified Lady Temple’s prudence, had met Mr. Touchett wandering in the lanes in the twilight, apparently without a clear idea of what he was doing there. And on the next evening there was quite an excitement, the curate looked so ill, and had broken quite down when he was practising with the choir boys before church; he had, indeed, gone safely through the services, but at school he had been entirely at a loss as to what Sunday it was, and had still more unfortunately forgotten that to be extra civil to Miss Villars was the only hope of retaining her services, for he had walked by her with less attention than if she had been the meanest scholar. Nay, when his most faithful curatolatress had offered to submit to him a design for an illumination for Christmas, he had escaped from her with a desperate and mysterious answer that he had nothing to do with illumination, he hoped it would be as sombre as possible.
No wonder Avonmouth was astonished, and that guesses were not confined to Mackarel Lane.