“You bluffed it through very well by all accounts,” said Tom Dolbear; “but you can’t defy the laws of marriage and expect the people as a whole to feel the same to you. However, you’ll live it down no doubt.”
Medora asked her mother whether Ned had taken further steps and Lydia did not know.
“Not to my knowledge,” she said. “He’s not one to do anything he’ll regret. He’s thinking of damages against Mr. Kellock, and I believe his lawyer’s of the same mind.”
“Is he going to leave here?”
“When he’s suited. Not sooner, I think.”
“Knox is after his house, I hear, and has got the first refusal for it,” said Tom Dolbear. “There’s a man in a hundred—Knox, I mean. That’s what I call a philosopher sort of man—looks ahead and sees the future’s only an echo of the past. So nothing he hears surprises him. We are very much alike in our opinions. What he wants with a house I don’t know, however. He may think to marry again, which would account for it.”
“I should hope Mr. Dingle would be gone pretty soon,” said Kellock. “It’s a bit callous him stopping, I think, things being as they are. It would be better for all parties if he went off in a dignified way, before the decree is pronounced.”
“I dare say he thought it was a bit callous when you bolted with his wife,” answered Mrs. Dolbear. “Least said soonest mended, if you ask me, young man.”
Whereupon Medora, who was nursing the new baby, hated it suddenly and handed it back to its mother.
“If you’re going to talk like that, Aunt Polly,” she said, “it wasn’t much good us coming.”