“Very well, Tom, I won’t betray you,” I replied, laughing.
And he said, “Thank you, miss,” and touched his hat again, and went off with his eggs. I was very much amused by this encounter and the important secret I had to keep. As if my mentioning that I had seen Tom at the Alders would necessarily entail the awful discovery that he was a Londoner!
By this time I thought I had better go in and see if any of the other people had come down to breakfast; and I was sauntering along, when, as I got near the house, I heard two men’s voices.
“Bella is getting jealous, Tom.”
A grunt in the other voice.
“I say, ain’t it rough on the little one?”
Then I heard Lady Mills’s voice, and when I got to the door there were eight or ten people already assembled. But the two nearest the door, whom I had overheard, were a gentleman named Cole and Mr. Carruthers. It was Mr. Carruthers who had grunted. Who was “Bella”? And who was “the little one”? And what did “rough on” mean?
The bells of Denham Church, which was close by, had begun to ring before breakfast was over, and Lady Mills wanted to know who was going.
“I am going, for one,” said Mrs. Clowes, and she looked across at Mr. Carruthers, who was helping himself to a great deal of marmalade.
“Do try to make up a respectable number,” said Lady Mills. “You can do just what you like, you know, as soon as it is over; and people in the country think so much of it. We scandalize the neighborhood quite enough, as it is, by not going to bed at ten o’clock, and other wicked practices. And last week we were only three at church out of a party of seventeen.”