“Hugh,” she said; “whatever you think, what Hugh must feel is far beyond and above anything we can understand, and we must not talk about ‘ought’ and ‘ought not.’”
“Aunt Lily says it is nonsense to say he had anything to do with it; but I know he thinks so himself.”
“Then, that is enough, without your discussing it,” said Flossy, with a sense of irreverence in thus roughly handling events so terrible. She did shrink at the thought of Hugh, but she would not have said so for the world.
Frederica was silenced, but she and her younger brother indulged secretly in much discussion and comment, the excitement of which relieved their dreary hours a little; and Hugh felt the little pricks their childish displeasure gave him. That Arthur showed none of it he attributed to a determination to avoid paining him. Had not Florence Venning shrunk away from him? Jem had fallen into Mrs Crichton’s policy of refusing to recognise any special reason for his unhappiness, and was taken up in softening matters as far as possible for Arthur; so that he was only too thankful to talk occasionally to his brother on other subjects, and with stifling slight pangs of regret that he had used up all his leave without that little run down to the cathedral town where Archdeacon Hayward resided, and without that Sunday when he went to church with Miss Helen and indulged his distant admiration for her.
On the afternoon after Flossy’s visit he remained in the drawing-room alone, readings the paper, for the others had dispersed. Jem sometimes wrote as well as read the papers, and as he perused an art-critique, from which he differed fundamentally, an answer to adorn the pages of the rival journal began to seethe in his brain. He could not help feeling that tones and tints, lights and shades, on canvas, would be a great relief from the overpowering feelings of real life. He murmured to himself: “If accuracy of drawing and truth of colour are to be sacrificed to a—to a meretricious prettiness and a false—”
“Oh, Jem, look here, read this!” exclaimed Arthur, coming hastily up to him with a letter in his hand. “Don’t you remember Fred Seton, who went to India?”
“What, a light-haired fellow, who came to see you one Christmas? Yes, what of him?”
“He has been very ill; he is coming home on sick-leave. He wants me to meet him at Marseilles.”
James remembered dimly that Arthur had always entertained a strong friendship for this Fred Seton, and had greatly regretted his going to India some two or three years before. He read the letter, which was written evidently in bad health and spirits and in ignorance of Arthur’s engagement, begging him, if possible, to come out and meet him.
“You know, Jem, his people are all dead. He is such a lonely fellow—I must go.”