“Yes. As serious as it could be. I taxed her with it quite sudden one day as she was sitting there on that same chair like as it might be you. And she turned quite white and confessed, and said as how it wasn’t that as troubled her most, but that he’d got tired of her, and wanted to get shut of her, and was crazy at the thought of the exposure and disgrace. ‘Why, it’s you that’s got the worst of that to bear; not him!’ cried I. And all on a sudden she gets quite quiet, and as it might be bites her lips together, so as no words she didn’t want to use mightn’t force themselves through. ‘Why don’t you speak to your brother?’ said I; ‘he’d get the fellow to do the right thing by you.’ But she only shook her head, and got up, and began to walk about, and just said in a low voice that I didn’t understand. And I began to guess it was a gentleman.”
“You taxed her with that?”
“Yes. She took it all in the same sullen way, and would name no names. But she said he loved another woman, and she’d have forgiven him anything but that.”
“But you should have got her to say who he was, woman!”
“Do you think, if wild horses could have dragged it from her, I shouldn’t have known? I tell you I never knew before what was in the girl; how obstinate she could be, nor what strong feelings she had. It was something quite different to what I’d ever felt, and I wasn’t the same with her as I’d been before. When she passed through this door that evening, it seemed as if a fierce, revengeful woman had gone out where just a giddy girl like myself had come in.”
Ned Mitchell was not moved by this recital to any show of deep emotion, but the woman could see that he was touched, and she went on in a voice less studiously cold—
“I didn’t see her again for some days—not for near a fortnight, I think. But when I did, it didn’t need her words to point out the change in her. I didn’t dare ask her many questions that time, but I’d got some inkling by then as to who those might be that was bringing her to this pass. I thought I’d try to get at the truth in a roundabout way if I could; so I began, ‘I didn’t see you at church on Sunday evening, Nell.’ Her face grew sullen at once. You see, sir, I’d heard of a certain clergyman that was often at the Hall Farm of an evening.”
“You mean Vernon Brander, I suppose?”
“Yes. And how Nell had been seen late o’ nights down by St. Cuthbert’s.”
“Well, now, I think his coming openly to the farm is more in his favor than not.”