Caroline looked so surprised that Mrs. Brenton laughed.
"Do you mean to tell me you have not heard the great news? It is known now to everybody," she said, "therefore I am not betraying confidences. I am so delighted about it, for I confess I have been hoping for this for a long time past. You know how dear Camilla is to me, and I like him immensely. Don't you?" Then Mrs. Brenton laughed. "Oh, I forgot you don't know him! It is funny that you never came across him when you were with his mother!"
"He used to go very seldom to see Mrs. Baynhurst," Caroline answered. She spoke slowly, as if her thoughts were occupied.
The engagement between Mrs. Lancing and Rupert Haverford was of course largely discussed at Yelverton, and was the favourite item of gossip elsewhere for the moment. As Camilla had prophesied, the world gave nearly all its congratulations to Haverford's betrothed. Mrs. Lancing was very delightful, very pretty—in every way a most charming woman; but there are any amount of charming and delightful and pretty women in the world, and rich men (rich, at least, in the great way that Haverford was) are so scarce.
Caroline was sharply startled when she heard that Mrs. Lancing was pledged to marry Rupert Haverford.
There was a suggestion of anxiety in the way her thoughts worked about the other woman.
Camilla had ceased utterly to be a stranger to her. If there had been nothing else to bind them together, that scene in the silence of the night would have put them into very close touch with one another. Moreover, it was natural that the girl should sit and weave stories to herself out of the material that lay to her hands.
There was everything about Camilla Lancing to excite the imagination, to stimulate the appetite for romance.
Agnes Brenton rejoiced frankly over the enormous material satisfaction this engagement signified, and Caroline joined with her in this; but she was unlike Mrs. Brenton in one respect, for whereas the older woman saw nothing but a certainty of happiness in this marriage, Caroline, young, unworldly as she was, felt from the very first that there was in this prospective union a doubtful element; that difficulties would most certainly present themselves—great difficulties, every whit as great, as black, and as heart shadowing as any that had belonged to Camilla in the past.
She needed very little now to convince herself that Haverford would meet those difficulties in a firm, a straightforward way. But what about the woman?