And now poor Mrs Berens was in sad trouble.
“I know it,” she sobbed to herself, after a visit from the doctor. “Mary Salis will not confess, and Leo always holds one off; but he does love Leo, and she is holding him in her wicked chains, like one of those terrible witches we read about; and, poor dear man, she is breaking his heart. I’ve tried so hard to wean him from that dreadful love of a bad, base girl, and the more I try the worse he is.”
Mrs Berens sobbed till her eyes ached, and she bathed them with eau-de-cologne and water.
“How dare I say she is bad and base?” she said half aloud, speaking to herself in the glass, as her handsome, large, blue swimming eyes looked appealingly at her; “because I know it. I’m sure of it. I can always feel it. I’m weak and foolish, but I should love him and cherish him, while she is trifling with him—I’m sure—and breaking his heart.
“Oh, poor man, poor man!” she sighed; “how worn out and ill he looks! What shall I do? What shall I do?”
Mrs Berens made up her mind what she would do. She could not send for the curate. She was not sufficiently ill for that.
“And it would look so.”
She could not go and see him, for that would also “look so.” Leo detested her, she knew, quite as much as she detested Leo, whom she declared to be so horribly young. But she could go and see poor Mary; and after well bathing her eyes, she stripped her little conservatory to get a good bunch of flowers for the invalid, and then went across to the Rectory.
Leo was out for a ride, to Mrs Berens’ great delight.
“Master’s in his study over his sermon, ma’am,” said Dally Watlock; “but Miss Mary’s in, ma’am.”