Edward Morgan was the man who, with heavy playfulness, had pulled her curls in the days of her childhood. Despite the fact that she rather liked him, she looked upon him as almost elderly; he had seemed to her elderly at thirty.
“Don’t be absurd,” interposed Miss Agatha sharply. “Mr Morgan is in the prime of life.”
Although he would have enjoyed the business of squashing her, William, in his determination to ignore Prudence’s existence, was compelled to let the remark pass unchallenged. He addressed himself pointedly to his father on matters appertaining to the works, while the five Miss Graynors interchanged commonplaces, and Prudence was left to the satisfying of a healthy young appetite, and her own reflections, which, judging from her expression of pleasant abstraction, were more entertaining than the scrappy conversation to which she paid no attention.
At the finish of the meal Miss Agatha created a diversion by requesting William to call at the police station to report that tramps had been loitering on the premises and had made havoc of the flowers in the borders. William required to be shown the borders, which he inspected with an air of pompous vexation, describing the damage as scandalous and an outrage, to the secret amusement of his youngest sister, who observed him critically from the French window of the drawing-room, which looked upon the borders in question. William was aware of her presence and of the smiling impertinence of her glance. It may have been the sight of her standing there in her scornful indifferent youth that accounted for the connecting thought which caused him to lift his eyes with swift suspicion to the window above the despoiled bed. Prudence, intercepting the upward glance, felt her cheeks suddenly aglow. For the first time since their disagreement he looked her fully in the face; then, with a change of expression that was a studied insult, he looked away.
“I don’t think it is the work of a tramp,” he said. “But I will inform the police. If anyone is caught loafing about the premises I’ll run him in.”
And Prudence, gazing upon the outraged dignity of his retreating back, laughed with considerable enjoyment.
“If only he could see how ridiculous he looks!” she mused, and stepped out upon the path, and gathered a wallflower head, which with an air of bravado she pinned in the front of her dress.
She regretted that she could not write to Steele and inform him of the havoc he had wrought and the distress this caused the family. She wrote instead to Bobby, describing in detail the whole surprising event of Steele’s visit and its result; and Bobby, whose letters she was permitted to receive uncensored, commented briefly upon the episode and added that he would jolly well like to punch the fellow’s head. Bobby’s incipient jealousy was always taking fire when anyone loomed on Prudence’s horizon with a prominence which threatened to eclipse his own popularity; and this matter of Steele, it occurred to him while reading Prudence’s frankly worded enthusiasms, was more serious than anything that had transpired hitherto in the youthful experiences of his aunt. There was just sufficient Graynor blood in his veins to excite resentment in him at the thought of Prudence hanging out of the window to talk with any fellow in the night; but he was wise enough not to put that on paper. His want of sympathy, however, disappointed Prudence. For the first time in her life she caught herself wondering whether there was a latent possibility for Bobby of development upon his uncle’s lines. But she put this idea aside as absurd; Bobby was the son of his father, and his father had flung off the family yoke early, and gone away and married a penniless girl of no family, and never repented. That was what Prudence admired most in him, that he had never solicited the forgiveness which was not voluntarily extended. That was how she would act in similar circumstances.
When in due course Bobby came home for the summer vacation, Prudence made a strange discovery; she could not, she found, discuss Steele with him. It had been easy to write, with the excitement of the experience fresh in her memory, of the pleasure of Steele’s visit and the stresses that ensued; but in the interval she had thought much about Steele, and missed him increasingly; and now she found it not only difficult but impossible to speak of him without constraint and a certain shyness foreign to her nature and oddly disconcerting. When Bobby referred to the fellow she had written to him about, she disposed of the matter briefly.
“Oh, that!” she said. “That’s ancient history. Lots of duller things have happened since and put that in the background.”