She speaks again now.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she says.
‘Oh, Susan, why not?’ asks Betty, who is sitting with her hands folded behind her head, perhaps because if she brought them forward she might find some knitting to do, too. Idle hands they are, only made for mischief; so is the face to which they belong.
‘Because it’s nonsense,’ says Susan, shrugging her shoulders, and drawing Bonnie closer to her. ‘And, besides, I don’t want to believe it.’
‘Oh, I do!’ says Betty, with a little grin from under her big sun-hat. ‘Go on, Jacky.’
‘I saw her, I saw her plain,’ says Jacky, his rosy round face fired with joy at the thought of being for once the bearer of important news. ‘She was walking about in the garden.’
‘In,’ from Susan, in a severe tone, ‘Mr. Wyndham’s garden?’
‘Yes, in there.’ Jacky now looks as though he is going to burst. ‘Why don’t you believe me? I saw her, I tell you. I saw her quite plain. An’ her hair is dark, a lot darker than yours, an she’s got a blue frock like your Sunday one, only better.’
Susan interrupts him with dignity.
‘I don’t see how Mrs. Denis’s——’ Denis’s wife was always called Mrs. Denis; if she had any other name, it was sunk beneath insuperable barriers. Mr. and Mrs. Denis she and her husband had been since the priest poured his blessing down upon them and made them one in the old chapel built on the rock at the end of the village. This rock gave the parish priest a distinct crow over the Protestant clergyman.