‘Oh! I don’t want a husband. He’d be in the way. We’d send him off to India or somewhere, like Aunt Lily’s.’
‘Don’t, Fly; it is not at all nice to have papa away.’
‘Oh yes, it would be ten hundred times better if he were at home.’
Such were the mingled sentiments of the triad, as they went upstairs to bed, linked together in their curious fashion.
Some time later, a bedroom discussion of affairs was held by Lady Merrifield and Miss Mohun, who had not had a moment alone together all day, to converse upon the two versions of the disaster which the latter had extracted from Dolores and Constance, and which fairly agreed, though Constance had been by far the most voluble, and somewhat ungenerously violent against her former friend, at least so Lady Merrifield remarked.
‘You should take into account the authoress’s disappointed vanity.’
‘Yes, poor thing! How he must have nattered her!’
‘Besides, there is the loss of the money, which, I fear, falls as seriously on good Miss Hacket as on the goose herself.’
‘Does it, indeed? That must not be. How much is it?’
‘Fifteen pounds; and that foolish Constance fancies that poor Dolores assisted in duping her. I really had to defend the girl; though I am just as angry myself when I watch her adamantine sullenness.’