“I have heard nothing about it,” said Mrs. Bonnington icily.
“Of course you wouldn’t,” said Mabin, keeping her tone in check. “But I see Rudolph has taken to riding one too since he’s been back. So if they throw stones at me, I can have my revenge upon him,” she concluded darkly.
“If girls unsex themselves, they can’t expect to be treated with the chivalry they used to receive,” said Mrs. Bonnington, as, not caring to continue the encounter with the rebellious one, she turned her back, and went down the hill.
CHAPTER II.
A PENITENT.
Mabin looked at Mrs. Bonnington’s retreating figure, half regretfully and half resentfully. The regret was for her own incivility; the resentment was for the want of tact which had provoked it.
Mabin, like so many other young girls on the threshold of womanhood, lived in a constant state of warfare both with herself and her neighbors. Sensitive, affectionate, hasty tempered and wilful, she was at the same time almost morbidly modest and mistrustful of herself; so that she passed her time in alternate bursts of angry resentment against those who misunderstood her, and fits of remorse for her own shortcomings.
She now mounted her bicycle with the feeling that the Vicar’s wife had spoilt her morning’s ride for her. Not by any means a vain girl, she underrated her own attractions, which included a pretty, gray-eyed little flower-face, a fair skin, and short, soft, dark-brown hair. But she was keenly alive to the reproach of clumsiness, which had so often been cast at her. She had shot up, within the last three years, to a height which, together with the girlish leanness of her figure, had caused her to be called, even outside the family circle, “a lamp-post” and a “gawky creature.” And although she stubbornly refused to take to the long skirts which would have lent her the grace she wanted, she nourished a smouldering indignation against her traducers.
And chief among these were the boys of the Vicarage, against whom, as against their mother for her criticisms, and their father for his dull sermons, her spirit was always in arms.
The strife between the Bonningtons and the Roses had not always been so keen. Indeed, in the old days when they were children together, Mabin and Rudolph had got on well enough together, and had exchanged love-tokens of ends of slate pencil, lumps of chalk, and bird’s eggs. But with advancing years had come first coolness and then estrangement. So that it was now the correct thing among the Bonnington boys to laugh at Mabin for being “advanced,” “superior,” “a New Woman,” and a “fright;” while she, on her side, treated them with lofty contempt as “savages” and “boors.”
Mabin had not gone twenty yards, however, on her way up the slight ascent, when she saw something which diverted her thoughts from the Vicarage people. The gates at “The Towers” were wide open, and Mrs. Dale’s smart victoria, with its well-matched pair of small, dark-brown horses, came out so suddenly that Mabin had to jump off her bicycle to avoid a collision. Alone in the carriage sat a lady in deep mourning, who turned and looked out anxiously at the girl, and stopped the carriage to speak to her.