Mrs. Brander stopped short in the mud, and looked at him with proud indignation.
“Of course I see you are insinuating that I have done so. Your new friends have been turning you against the old!”
“No. It seems, though I can scarcely believe it, that my old friends have been turning my new ones against me. Now, Evelyn, you are honest, aren’t you? Did you, or did you not, warn Mrs. Denison against me, as not being a proper friend for a young girl?”
Now, Vernon Brander only did his sister-in-law justice when he called her honest. Her blunt frankness, which made little account of other people’s feelings, had often been counted against her as a fault. Moreover, it was one result of her husband’s profession that, though not by nature over-scrupulous, lying should now seem a great sin to her. But the issues at stake seemed to her so great that it cost her only a moment’s hesitation to reply—
“I did not. I told her I understood you did not think of marrying. Was I wrong?”
“No,” answered Vernon, in a very low voice.
Evelyn’s great eyes were meeting his with the simple, direct stare habitual to her, which seemed to preclude the idea that she could lie. A weaker, a more sensitive, or a more modest nature would have shrunk from the gaze of his burning, pleading eyes. But her character was not built on complex lines; she felt that she was doing the best possible thing under the circumstances for herself and for everybody else, and so, her conscience being, as usual, free, there was no need for any airs of disquietude or remorse. And so the guileless man was caught at the first throw of the line, and was carried off to the house safe and subdued, while she informed him that Katie was not well, and that if he and his old housekeeper were willing to take charge of the little girl at St. Cuthbert’s for a fortnight, she thought the change would do her good.
The vicar’s wife had not overrated the effect of this proposal. To have his darling niece in his own care for two whole weeks was a bribe which would have tempted him to condone any wrong. By the light which came into his face as he quietly said he should be glad to have the child, Mrs. Brander knew that her trump card had been very well played, and that she had an influence ready to her hand which might be reckoned upon to counteract the dangerous one of Olivia Denison’s youth and beauty.
The tenant of the cottage watched the pair curiously as they passed his garden on the way up to the Vicarage. Nothing in the demeanor of either escaped his penetrating eyes. Absorbed as he was in one object, every smallest incident which occurred in his neighborhood was regarded by him as having a possible bearing upon it.
“I wonder,” he said to himself, as they turned the corner into the private road at the top of the hill, “what is the reason of the interest that parson’s wife takes in her husband’s brother? Pretty strong it must be to bring my lady out into the puddles in those finicking togs of hers! Love, passion, anything of that sort? She ain’t built that way; and if she had liked him best, she would either have married him or she’d have given ’em something to talk about by this time. I should like to think there was a woman in the secret—my secret; it would make my work seventy-five per cent. easier.”