"Well, well, well, child, you needn't be so fierce! Poor young man! I can't help feeling sorry for his disappointment," said Mrs. Dobbs.
"Don't waste your sorrow on him, granny; he ought to have known better."
"Well, as to that, May——" began her grandmother, with a slow smile spreading over her face.
"Now, granny dear, only listen! At any rate he might have known better when he was told, mightn't he? But he would not take 'no' for an answer; and when Uncle Frederick spoke to him the next day, he was quite rude, and declared—it makes me so hot when I think of it!—declared he had been encouraged! The idea of his daring to say such a thing! And, you know all the time I quite thought he was as good as engaged to Conny Hadlow. Everybody said so in Oldchester."
"'Everybody' is a person who makes a good many mistakes about his neighbours' affairs, May. Mrs. Simpson says that young Bransby is not coming down here this summer."
"So much the better! However, in any case, he would not honour you with one of his condescending visits now. Do you remember that evening when he called in Friar's Row? How little we thought——"
May chatted with as much apparent candour and frankness as ever. But in all her descriptions of the people whom she met in London there was not one who seemed to fit Mrs. Dormer-Smith's unknown.
"Maybe her saying no word is a sign she likes him," reflected Mrs. Dobbs; "girls will keep a secret of that kind very close. They are shy of it even in their own thoughts. If I saw him and her together, I could make a shrewd guess as to how things are."
But there was no chance of her seeing them together, and the gentleman of princely fortune remained wrapped in mystery.
Meanwhile, May went to see her old friends, and was pronounced by most of them to be quite unspoiled by her London season. But one critical spirit, at least, there was in Oldchester, who did not look on Miss Cheffington with unmixed approbation: Mr. Sebastian Bach Simpson declared that she gave herself airs.