“Neither horse-mint nor wild parsnip could avail: there is no ointment against suicide,” Miss Gentry explained. “She killed herself.”
“A queen kill herself! What for?”
“What does one kill oneself for?” Miss Gentry demanded crushingly. “For love, of course. But I hope her namesake is more respectable. Cleopatra never published the banns. But how comes this Miss Jones to be at Foxearth Farm? I thought the people were called Purley—hurdle-makers, aren’t they?”
“Yes—it must be a lodger. They do take lodgers. I must ask Barnaby—I meet him on the road sometimes.” She stood still suddenly, going red and white by turns like the revolving lens of a lighthouse.
Miss Gentry stared, then smiled in sentimental sympathy “Is he a nice boy?” she cooed.
“Who? Ye-es, very nice,” Jinny stammered. “But I’ve just remembered Miss Jones isn’t his sister!”
“Who said she was? Oh, Jinny, Jinny!” Miss Gentry sometimes became roguish.
“She’s only his stepsister,” Jinny explained desperately. “Mrs. Purley’s first husband was called Jones.”
If the bride should really be the Purley creature—the fair charmer who rode so often in Will’s coach as to be almost “keeping company” with him! What a lifting of a nightmare! What a sudden horizon of rose! But no, it was too good to be true!
“But I never heard she was called Cleopatra,” she wound up sadly.