“I am very glad to hear it. I was quite distressed by his manner; indeed, latterly I have frequently noticed how variable his spirits have been.”
I did not speak, and Uncle Dominick went on again with a little hesitation—
“I will confess to you, my dear Theo, that before you came Willy had been causing me very serious anxiety. You see, this is a lonely place; the O’Neills are much away from home, and he had no companions of his own age and station.”
“No, I suppose not,” I said, considerably puzzled as to the drift of all this.
My uncle stroked his long moustache several times.
“Well, my dear, you know the old proverb, ‘No company, welcome trumpery;’ that, I am sorry to say, is what the danger was with Willy. It came to my knowledge that he was in the habit of—a—of spending a great deal of his time in the house of—“—he hummed and hawed, ending with suppressed vehemence—“in the house of one of my work-people.”
I held my breath, with perhaps some presentiment of what was coming.
“Yes,” my uncle said, bringing his stick heavily down on the ground; “I heard, to my amazement and horror, that the attraction for him there was the daughter, an impudent girl, who was evidently using every means in her power to entangle him!”
“An impudent girl!” What was it that he had once said about a girl who had been taken out of her proper place, and had at once began to presume? In the same instant the answer flashed upon me—Anstey! Of course, it was she. How had I been so blind?
My uncle was silent for a few moments, and my thoughts raced back to incidents, unconsidered at the time, but which now recurred, fraught with a new meaning. I understood it all now—the girl standing in the niche at the lodge gate; the words which I had overheard at the plantation; last of all, the figure in the rain at the hall door on the night of the dance.