“It’s really a new sensation—to settle a bill,” he said to himself. “An outlawed bill, too. What luck—just my rotten luck!”
XI
AT Mrs. Ridgie’s they guessed that Frothingham had proposed to Cecilia and that she had been unnerved by the shock to her widowed heart. He stayed on until the following Monday, neither amused nor amusing, then returned to Mrs. Staunton’s for two days. He found her intensely curious as to the trouble between Cecilia and him—she brought up the subject again and again, and with expert ingenuity at prying tried to trap him into telling her; she all but asked him point-blank. But he looked vague or vacant, pretended not to understand what she wanted, expressed lively interest in Cecilia’s progress toward health, professed keen regret that he must leave before she would be well enough to receive him.
As he was about to go Mrs. Staunton became desperate. “Allerton is a stern man,” she said, with an air that forbade the idea that mere vulgar curiosity was moving her. “He has the notion that Cecilia was not polite to you—you know, she gives way to strange moods. And he is so irritated against her that he is treating her harshly.”
Frothingham looked astonished. “Really!” he said. “How extraordinary. I can’t conceive how he happened to wander off into that. Nothing could be farther from the truth.”
“I confess,” Mrs. Staunton went on, “I’m much disappointed. I’ve taken a fancy to you. I had rather hoped that you and Cecilia would like each other—you understand.”
Frothingham reflected. It was possible, yes, probable, that Cecilia’s father could drive her into marrying him, would do it if he should hint to Mrs. Staunton that he did fancy Cecilia and was “horribly cut up” because she didn’t fancy him. “What the devil do her feelings matter to me?” he demanded of himself. “A month after we were married she’d forget all this ghost nonsense and would be thanking me for pulling her out of it.”
“And,” Mrs. Staunton was saying, “I know her father would have liked it as well as I.”