‘What is your name?’ asks she timidly, but very sweetly.
‘Susan Barry.’
‘That sounds like the beginning of the Catechism,’ says Carew, who is, as we know, a clergyman’s son, and therefore up to little points like this.
‘I knew it,’ says Ella, still very shyly, to Susan—‘I knew it in a way. Mrs. Denis told me. But I wanted to be quite sure. You are Miss Barry?’
‘Oh no; only Susan,’ says the pretty proprietor of that name. ‘My aunt is Miss Barry. But I hope you will call me Susan. It is’—mournfully—‘a dreadfully ugly name, isn’t it?’
‘No, no; indeed, I like it.’
‘I hope you will like mine,’ says Carew, breaking into the conversation. ‘It is Carew. Susan and the others call it Crew, but that’s an abbreviation of me to which I object. But your name,’ says he. ‘We should like to know that.’
Has he thrown a bomb into the assembly? Something, at all events, has stricken the stranger dumb. She shrinks backwards, playing with a branch of the Wigelia rosea near her, as if to hide her embarrassment. What is her name? She tells herself that she does not know, that she disbelieves in the name forced upon her by those dreadful people she had lived with after—After what? Even that is vague to her. Was it after her mother’s death? Hints and innuendoes from the Moores had given her to believe that Moore, at all events, was not her real name. But beyond that she knows nothing.
‘My name is Ella,’ says she, in a miserable tone. ‘Call me that if—you will.’
‘Such a pretty name!’ says Susan. ‘Why did you think we shouldn’t like it? So much nicer than Susan. Isn’t mine horrid? But what is your other name?’