‘Follow your mother’s example, Gillian,’ said Lord Rotherwood, ‘and, if possible, never hear, certainly never attend to, what any one says of you behind your back.’
‘Is said to have said of you, you should add, Rotherwood,’ put in the colonel. ‘It is a decree worse than eavesdropping.’
‘Oh, Regie!’ exclaimed his sister.
‘Well, not perhaps for your own honour and conscience, but the keyhole is a more trustworthy medium than the reporter.’
‘That’s a strong way of stating it, but, at any rate, the keyhole has no temper nor imagination, or prejudice of its own,’ said Lady Merrifield.
‘No, and as far as it goes, it enables you to judge of the frame in which the words, even if correctly reported, were spoken,’ added Colonel Mohun.
‘The moral of which is,’ said Lord Rotherwood, drolly, ‘that Gillian is not to take notice of anyone’s observations upon her unless she has heard them through the keyhole.’
‘And so one would never hear them at all.’
‘Q. E. D.,’ said Lord Rotherwood. ‘And now, Lily, do you. ever sing the two evening-hymns. Ken and Keble, now, as the family used to do on Sundays at the Old Court, long ere the days of ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern’?
‘Don’t we?’ said Lady Merrifield. ‘Only all our best voices will be singing it at Rawul Pindee!’