LII.
I FINISH THE SICILIAN LOVE-STORY.
It might have been supposed that my little experience in gathering up loose ends would have deterred me from further efforts in this direction, but it did not.
I had left Miss Laniston without asking some questions I had intended to put to her. I wished very much to know—I thought it was my right to know—something definite about the Mr. Brownson who had formerly been connected, so to speak, with the Misses Raynor. I hated this subject as I hated the vilest medicine, but I felt that I must get the matter straightened in my mind, yet I could not say anything to Sylvia about it. And after what Miss Laniston had read to me I could not ask her anything, even if my mind had been sufficiently composed to formulate questions. She was a very plain-spoken person. Too much so, perhaps.
Walkirk was very different; in fact, I think he erred on the other side. I am sure that he would have liked to conceal from me anything that would give me pain. In the course of his life he had met a great many people; he might know something about Brownson. Any way, I would throw out some feelers in that direction.
"Yes," I remarked to him, in the course of a conversation about the late Mother Superior, "what she is going to do is a very fine thing,—a noble enterprise, and she is just the sort of person to go into it, but after all I would rather see her married to the right sort of man. A woman like that owes it to society to be married."
"I fancy," said Walkirk, "that she has permanently left the marrying class. When she broke with Brownson, I think she broke with marriage."
"What were the points of that?" I asked. "Did you ever happen to hear anything about him?"
"I knew him very well," answered Walkirk. "Those were his prints I was cataloguing just before I entered your service. He had then been dead a year or more, and I was working for the estate."