“After having had the unpardonable insolence to leave your call unreturned, she has got hold of your son?” gasped Mrs. Rose.
“Well, not exactly that, as far as I know,” admitted the Vicar’s wife. “He says he has never spoken to her. And the dear boy has never told me an untruth before.”
“But if this dreadful woman has entangled him, of course she might make him say anything!” cried Mrs. Rose in sympathetic agonies.
“I should not like to accuse a fellow-woman of doing that,” replied Mrs. Bonnington, severely; “but I think it is a bad and unnatural sign, when my son, who has never taken the least notice of any of the young girls in the neighborhood, becomes absorbed, in a few days, in the doings of a person who is a complete stranger to him and who calls herself a widow.”
“Then don’t you think,” purred Mrs. Rose, with the eagerness of one who scents a scandal, “that she is a widow?”
There was a pause. And Mrs. Bonnington spoke next, with the deliberation of one who has a great duty to perform.
“I should be very sorry to have it said of me that I was the first to start a rumor which might be thought unchristian or unkind,” she said with a deprecatory wave of the brown cotton gloves she wore in the mornings. “But I have thought it my duty to make inquiries, and I deeply regret to say that I have found out several things which lead me to the conclusion that this person has settled down in our midst under false pretences.”
“You don’t say so!”
“You shall judge for yourself. In the first place, although she calls herself Mrs. Dale, the initials on some of her linen are ‘D. M.’ Now M. does not stand for ‘Dale,’ does it?”
“Perhaps her maiden name began with M.,” suggested Mrs. Rose.