“Well, it’s she that has done most. She has him tight.”
“I see, I see. Good-bye.” The women had already embraced, and this was not repeated; but Mrs. Jordan went down with her guest to the door of the house. Here again the younger lingered, reverting, though three or four other remarks had on the way passed between them, to Captain Everard and Lady Bradeen. “Did you mean just now that if she hadn’t saved him, as you call it, she wouldn’t hold him so tight?”
“Well, I dare say.” Mrs. Jordan, on the doorstep, smiled with a reflexion that had come to her; she took one of her big bites of the brown gloom. “Men always dislike one when they’ve done one an injury.”
“But what injury had he done her?”
“The one I’ve mentioned. He must marry her, you know.”
“And didn’t he want to?”
“Not before.”
“Not before she recovered the telegram?”
Mrs. Jordan was pulled up a little. “Was it a telegram?”
The girl hesitated. “I thought you said so. I mean whatever it was.”