“Ah!” said he. “Was it my uncle who frightened you? Tell me all about it. Indeed, I know something of the cause already, I think.”
She leaned forward and spoke in a low voice.
“Since you and your friends went away,” she began, “Mr Bayre has shown a strange restlessness and irritability; and instead of merely treating me with indifference, as he did before, he has seemed to take an absolute and strong dislike to me, so much so that he scarcely spoke to me without harshness, or a sort of querulousness still more difficult to endure. And in the meantime the two Vazons, who presume upon having the care of your uncle’s child”—Bayre listened intently to these words, but dared make no remark upon them—“kept more closely about him than ever, and evidently influenced the way he treated me. Naturally I resented this. And I resented, too, the way in which I was being thrown into the arms of this good Monsieur Blaise, who, I must tell you, is by no means so deeply enamoured of my charms as your uncle wished to make out, but who seemed rather to submit to the thought of marrying me than to show any enthusiasm over it.”
“What!” cried Bayre, indignantly. “I can’t believe it! Is he deaf and blind?”
Miss Eden laughed and blushed very prettily.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said she, “but at any rate you could see for yourself that he is past the age at which a man rushes headlong into matrimony. It seems he made careful inquiries into my ‘dot,’ and was disappointed to find I had only seventy pounds a year of my own.”
“The cad! The rascal!”
“Oh, not at all! Much more prudent than to dash into marriage, as some very silly young Englishmen might do—”
“Yes, yes, so they might—”
“Without making careful inquiries into their responsibilities. Well, he submitted with a good grace to my poverty-stricken condition, and things were in a very nice train, when—when—something happened, something that frightened me.”