‘Well, dear,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t well be more warmly attached to Julia than you were. I’m sure you used to be quite inseparable.’
Alice gave a little hoarse laugh.
‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘Dear Julia; I hope we shall be great friends again, when I come back from Brighton. I shall be very glad to, I am sure.’
Clearly the quarrels which led to warmer attachments had nothing to do with Alice’s late fury about Fysons, and her mother, throwing tact and delicacy about a daughter’s heart to the winds, tried another method of battering her way into it. She could not conceive why Alice did not tell her that Mr Silverdale had proposed to her.
‘I’ve been thinking, dear,’ she said, ‘that it would be but kind to ask Mr Silverdale down to Brighton while we are there. He looks as if a holiday would do him good. I would take a nice room for him in the hotel, and of course he would use our sitting room. Of course, I should make it quite clear to him that he was my guest, just as if he was staying with us here. Such walks and talks as you and he could have! What do you think of that for a plan?’
Alice was so stiff with horror at ‘that for a plan’ that she could barely articulate. Of course Mr Silverdale would refuse to come, the horror was but due to the mere notion that he should be asked.
‘Oh, I don’t think that would do at all, Mamma!’ she said. ‘It would be a very odd thing to propose.’
‘I don’t see why. You and he are such friends. I shall write to him and suggest it, or you might; perhaps that would be best: he can but say he cannot manage it, though for my part I should be very much surprised if he did not accept.’
Alice got up from the table where she had just written an affectionate little note to Julia, and came up to her mother’s chair, quivering with apprehension.
‘You really must do nothing of the sort,’ she said. ‘There are reasons against it: I can’t tell you them.’