“Upon my word, Lydia, you astonished me this afternoon!” Mr. Percy Joscelyn condescended to say to his sister that evening. “I really had no idea of your ability before. You managed the situation perfectly. I never saw anything better done than the way you took possession of Kyrle.” He laughed softly. “The fellow’s face, when he stepped into his gondola, was a study!”
Lydia flushed at the laugh. She was pleased to be commended—to have proved conclusively that she had power to do what she had undertaken; but her vanity suffered under the imputation that she had forced herself upon an unwilling man. No woman likes to feel this. Even if it be a fact, she conceals it as far as possible from herself, and never forgives the person who thrusts it brutally before her.
“I did not find it at all difficult to monopolize Mr. Kyrle, as you call it,” she said, with a tone of offense in her voice. “He did not seem to object to being monopolized. And about Aimée—I have found out just what I expected—he never was her lover at all.”
“How do you know?” asked her brother, eagerly.
“Because he told me so. Oh, you need not laugh! I was not foolish enough to ask the question as a question; I made him tell me what I wanted to know without his hardly being aware that he was telling it. I think I remember all the conversation. It was like this—”
She proceeded to give a fairly accurate report of it, to which Percy listened with the keenest attention, and, when she finished, admitted that her conclusions were probably right.
“I agree with you that it was most likely some tricky game of Fanny Berrien’s, in which she used Aimée as a blind,” he said. “And, late in the day as it is, there is nothing I should like so much as to get on the track of it and expose her. But we have no proof—none whatever—for you say this fellow will not speak, and we know that Aimée will not.”
“He may speak—that is, he may give me information without intending to do so, as he did this afternoon,” Lydia calmly replied. “I don’t despair of finding out the whole thing; but, after all, it has no great bearing on the present state of affairs.”
“More than you imagine,” her brother said. “A hold on Mrs. Meredith would be the most useful thing possible to me just now. If, as I don’t doubt, this man was an old lover of hers, she has not only deceived her husband with regard to him, but she is now bringing him forward as a suitor for Aimée. Give me one iota of proof of the story we both believe, and I will go to her and say: ‘You have probably still sufficient influence over Mr. Kyrle to send him away.’ If not, I shall have the pleasure of telling Mr. Meredith the story of your love affair with him in the past. Get me the proof, Lydia—give me the power to say this—and there is nothing you can ask me that I will not do for you.”