I made it out quickly enough. “It’s a denunciation?”
“A real lady doesn’t betray her husband!” this virtuous woman exclaimed.
I burst out laughing, and I fear my laugh may have had an effect of impertinence. “Especially to Miss Anvoy, who’s so easily shocked? Why do such things concern her?” I asked, much at a loss.
“Because she’s there, exposed to all his craft. Mr. and Mrs. Pudney have been watching this: they feel she may be taken in.”
“Thank you for all the rest of us! What difference can it make when she has lost her power to contribute?”
Again Mrs. Saltram considered; then very nobly: “There are other things in the world than money.” This hadn’t occurred to her so long as the young lady had any; but she now added, with a glance at my letter, that Mr. and Mrs. Pudney doubtless explained their motives. “It’s all in kindness,” she continued as she got up.
“Kindness to Miss Anvoy? You took, on the whole, another view of kindness before her reverses.”
My companion smiled with some acidity “Perhaps you’re no safer than the Mulvilles!”
I didn’t want her to think that, nor that she should report to the Pudneys that they had not been happy in their agent; and I well remember that this was the moment at which I began, with considerable emotion, to promise myself to enjoin upon Miss Anvoy never to open any letter that should come to her in one of those penny envelopes. My emotion, and I fear I must add my confusion, quickly deepened; I presently should have been as glad to frighten Mrs. Saltram as to think I might by some diplomacy restore the Pudneys to a quieter vigilance.
“It’s best you should take my view of my safety,” I at any rate soon responded. When I saw she didn’t know what I meant by this I added: “You may turn out to have done, in bringing me this letter, a thing you’ll profoundly regret.” My tone had a significance which, I could see, did make her uneasy, and there was a moment, after I had made two or three more remarks of studiously bewildering effect, at which her eyes followed so hungrily the little flourish of the letter with which I emphasised them that I instinctively slipped Mr. Pudney’s communication into my pocket. She looked, in her embarrassed annoyance, capable of grabbing it to send it back to him. I felt, after she had gone, as if I had almost given her my word I wouldn’t deliver the enclosure. The passionate movement, at any rate, with which, in solitude, I transferred the whole thing, unopened, from my pocket to a drawer which I double-locked would have amounted, for an initiated observer, to some such pledge.