"He seems quite optimistic about it," Stephen replied.
It now seemed good to Valerie to declare in agitated tones that she could see what they were all getting at, but if anyone thought she had killed Mr. Herriard they were wrong, and she wished that she had never been born.
Mrs. Dean, whom Stephen's announcement had cast into a mood of bitter reflection, was forced to wrench herself from her thoughts to frustrate an attempt on her daughter's part to break into strong hysterics. Valerie cast herself on the scented bosom in a storm of noisy tears, saying that everyone had been beastly to her ever since she Iiad set foot in this beastly house; and, with the exception of Joseph, who fussed about in an agitated and useless manner, the rest of the party lost no time in dispersing.
Maud told Mathilda, on her placid way to the morning-room, that she thought it was a good thing Stephen was not going to marry Valerie, since she seemed an uncontrolled girl, not at all likely to make him comfortable. She seemed to have no comment to make on the new and lurid light thrown on to Nathaniel's murder, and Mathilda was unable to resist the impulse to ask her if she had grasped the meaning of what Stephen had told them.
"Oh yes!" Maud said. "I always thought something like that must have happened."
Mathilda fairly gasped. "You thought it? You never said so!"
"No, dear. I make a point of not interfering," Maud explained.
"I must confess it hadn't occurred to me that any of us could be quite so base!" Mathilda said.
Maud's face was quite inscrutable. "Hadn't it?" she said, uninterested and unsurprised.
Valerie, meanwhile, had been led upstairs, gustily sobbing, by her mother, who vented her own annoyance at having so precipitately jettisoned Stephen on Joseph, telling him that although she was never one to make trouble she felt bound to say that her girlie had been treated at Lexham with a total lack of consideration.