“You quite mistake, mamma, I’m not cross; I’m only tired. I’m sorry you did not let him go off to the sick old man. He’s plainly pining to go and give him his gruel and his medicine.”
“Did he speak of him?” asked the old lady.
“No, nor of anything else: but he’s plainly thinking of him, and thinks he has murdered him—at least he looks as if he was going to be hanged, and I don’t care if he was,” answered Miss Clara.
“You must make allowances, my dear Clara,” said she. “You forget that the circumstances are very distressing.”
“Very cheerful, I should say. Why, he hates his father, I dare say. Did not you hear the picture he drew of him? and it’s all hypocrisy, and I don’t believe his father has really anything to do with his moping.”
“And what do you suppose is the cause of it?” inquired Mrs. Kincton Knox.
“I really can’t tell; perhaps he’s privately married, or in love with a milliner perhaps, and that has been the cause of this quarrel,” she said with an indolent mockery that might be serious, and, at all events, puzzled the elder lady.
“Ho! stuff, my dear child!” exclaimed her mother, with an uneasy scorn. “You had better call Brookes and get your habit off. And where did you leave him?”
“At the hall door,” replied Miss Clara, as she walked out of the room.
“H’m, stuff!” repeated Mrs. Kincton Knox, still more uneasily, for she knew that Clara had her wits about her.