“If I did, it was because I was surprised to—to—see who you were with.”
“How do you mean?” queried Vestalia, puzzled. “We were both entire strangers to you, surely.”
“No. I recognised the gentleman from a picture I had seen of him. I had a kind of idea that he was not precisely a nice gentleman for you to be with.”
“Then you had a preposterous and wickedly mistaken kind of idea,” said Vestalia, with decision. “There isn’t a truer or nobler-spirited gentleman on this earth than he is. I have reason to know what I say. If anybody has told you otherwise, you have been lied to, that’s all.”
“Dear, dear, how much you are in earnest,” cried Adele. “You must be my friend, and defend me behind my back like that, too. If he liked your hair immensely, why, so do I.”
“Don’t let us joke about him,” put in Vestalia, with seriousness. “I feel very keenly about my obligation to him. He saved my life—and—and I’d rather talk about something else. We were speaking of the Skinners—and their pedigree.”
Adele assented, with an inclination of the head, to the diversion, though her eyes retained their gleam of surprised curiosity. “Yes, the Skinners,” she said, vaguely.
“I can trace them up to Sir Theobald Skinner, Knight, who obtained a grant of the Abbey lands of Coggesthorpe, Suffolk, in 1541—who in turn was the grandfather of Walter Skinner, who married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of John Banstock, Esquire, of Meechy, Norfolk, and became first Lord Gunser.”
Adele pricked up her ears. “What is that? Are we related to the nobility? Oh, that is what papa meant by something interesting and important! Who would have supposed he could be so sly? Oh, sure enough, that would account for——” She broke off short, and smiled, first knowingly to herself, then with frank cordiality to Vestalia. “Oh, go on,” she urged. “Tell me about our lords.” Vestalia shook her head. “We—that is, you have no lords nowadays,” she admitted, ruefully. “The Gunser peerage became extinct in the male line nearly two hundred years ago. The collateral branches of the family sank to be yeomen on the soil their ancestors had owned—some of them became even peasants, agricultural labourers. There are no prosperous or polite Skinners nowadays—except your immediate branch.”
“And even I haven’t got polite eyes,” laughed Adele. “Yes, I remember papa telling how poor his people were. He hardly knew the taste of meat, he said, till he went to America as a boy. And so you have traced all his relations out. Are there any cousins or near connections living now, do you know? He had a brother older than himself, Abram was his name, I fancy, and he enlisted in the army and went to the dogs, I think. At least, father never heard of him afterward.”