“Why, that it must be all perfectly correct, my dear, and need not give you the slightest uneasiness. That our fair little daughter-in-law regularly writes and receives letters from a certain person, is of course a sufficient proof of the correctness of both correspondence and correspondent,” said the colonel, gallantly.
“All that may be very true, and at the same time very indiscreet—think of what they say.”
“Tah—tah, my love! never mind ‘they say!’ the only practical part of it is, that in the absence of Ralph, if I should happen to meet with ‘they say’ in man’s form, I shall be at the trouble of chastising him, that’s all!”
“Now, colonel! of all things, I do hope that you will not, at your age, do anything rash.”
“Then, my pretty one, pray do not trouble me or yourself, and far less little Margaret, with this ridiculous wickedness,” he said, drawing her head down to give her a parting kiss, and then good-humoredly putting her out of the study.
Colonel Houston, in his contempt of gossip, had unhappily treated the subject with more levity than it deserved. In such a neighborhood as this of which I write, calumny is not to be despised or lived down—it must be met and strangled; or it will be pampered and cherished until it grows a very “fire-mouthed dragon, horrible and bright.”
In such a place events and sensations do not rapidly succeed each other, and a choice piece of scandal is long “rolled as a sweet morsel under the tongue.” Margaret either ceased to write obnoxious letters, or else she changed her post office, but that circumstance did not change the subject of village gossip—it only furnished a new cause of conjecture. And this continued until near Christmas, when Frank Houston was expected home to spend the holidays, and a large party was invited to dinner and for the evening to meet him.
Frank arrived on Christmas eve, at night. He involuntarily betrayed some little agitation on first meeting Margaret; his emotion, slight as it was, and soon as it was conquered, was perceived by his fond stepmother, upon whom it produced the effect of reviving all her former feelings of suspicion and resentment toward Margaret, for having, as she supposed, trifled with his affections, and abandoned him in favor of his elder brother. And this resuscitated hostility was unconsciously increased by Frank, who, being alone with his stepmother later in the evening, said with a rueful attempt at smiling:
“So Ralph and my little Margo—mine no longer! are to be married. Well, when I went away I charged him with the care of my little love; and he has taken excellent care of her, that is all.”
“You have been treated villainously, Franky! villainously, my poor boy! And I am grieved to death to think I had anything to do with it! only—what could I do at such a time as that, when her mother, my poor, dear, Marguerite, was dying?” said Nellie, half crying from the mixed motives of revived grief for the loss of her friend, and indignation at what she persisted in regarding as the wrongs of her favorite stepson.