"But," she protested, "Mr. Archie goes so much to that house!"
"But now," said my mother, "don't you see, he won't go so much."
Indeed the dear manager felt that she had killed two birds with one stone. Lucy had a good place, and from now on there would be in the Fultons' house a living reason why a man of tact (like her beloved son!) should keep away. Alas, mother, there were other living reasons in that house which should have served to keep me away, and didn't.
I heard from my mother of the arrangement and was troubled. For once in her life of smoothing out other people's lives she had blundered seriously. Her measures had in them only this of success: that I found many excuses for not taking meals in the Fultons' house, and from that time forward saw Hilda very seldom. My mother gave her a lot of clothes, and quite a lot of money, I suppose, and the poor child for a while dropped out of sight. But not out of mind, I can tell you; for it worried me sick to feel that she was always in Lucy's house, watching and listening when she could.
I had not at this time had any great experience with the passion of jealousy. But a man who reads the newspapers, or has done his turn at jury duty in Criminal Sessions, cannot be ignorant of the desperate acts to which now and again it drives men and women.
Hilda, according to the slight knowledge I had of her character, was gentle and patient; she would be treated by Lucy as all Lucy's servants were, with the greatest tact and friendliness, and still the mere fact of her presence in that house filled me with forebodings. She would be in a position to make so much trouble, if ever anything should happen to start her on the war path. She had proved already that her moral nature was not superior to eavesdropping; already she had my secret by the ears, and one-sided and innocent though that secret may have appeared to her, it was not really a one-sided secret, and when she had got her clutch upon the other side, she could be almost as dangerous and mischievous as you please.
At best, Hilda was one more difficulty with which Lucy and I would have to contend.
It would have been wisest to tell Lucy all that I knew about Hilda. But you may have noticed with butterflies that they do not fly the straight line between two points; rather they fly in circles, with back-tracking, excursions, and gyrations, so that unless you have seen them start you cannot guess where they have started from, nor until the wings close and the insects come to a definite rest, are you in a position to know what their objective was.
In the face of our recently declared love for each other, any mention of Hilda's below-stairs passion for the "young master" seemed to me a blatant indelicacy. Almost it might have a quality of pluming and boasting, a gross acceptance of man's polygamous potentialities.
There would be time later for conversations in which future practicalities should take precedence over romantic fancies and protestations. Just now the Butterfly did not care a rap what should happen when winter came; for the present the world was filled with flowers—all his, and all containing honey.