It was awkward, certainly. And the awkwardness kept worrying and worrying at the back of Caroline’s mind all through the pleasure of going out in the carriage to make a call by themselves, and the delight of the call, which was diversified by peppermints, a fine collection of butterflies, and being allowed to try and play the harmonium.
It was while Charles and Charlotte were busy with this in the large bare room which had been the last rector’s drawing-room, and was now used for all sorts of parish parties, that Mr. Penfold took Caroline into the conservatory to show her a pet newt.
‘A friend of mine with an orange waistcoat,’ Mr. Penfold said.
He was a very nice newt, but even his orange-coloured stomach could not drive away the worries from the back of Caroline’s mind. How were the tumblers of food to be got to Rupert? Altogether she felt worried; the whole adventure was beginning to feel too big and too serious. And when Mr. Penfold, suddenly asking her if she could keep a secret, showed her a green parrot sitting on a nest behind a big geranium, she longed to say that she would keep his, and to tell him her own.
What she did say when she had admired the parrot was:
‘You’re a clergyman, and so I suppose you know all about right and wrong?’
‘I do my best to know,’ he said. ‘Well?’
‘Well, aren’t there some secrets you ought to keep, even if you know that some people would say you oughtn’t to if they were to know you were keeping them—only of course they don’t?’
I think it was rather clever of Mr. Penfold to understand this; but he did.
‘There are some things we all have to judge for ourselves,’ he said. ‘Could you give me an instance of the sort of thing you mean? Not the real thing you were thinking about, of course; but something like it.’