“Yes,” said Olivia. “We’ve been talking about Sybil. I’ve been telling him that he mustn’t think of her as some one to marry.”
The yellow face of Aunt Cassie lighted with a smile of approval. “I’m glad, my dear, that you’re being sensible about this. I was afraid you wouldn’t be, but I didn’t like to interfere. I never believe any good comes of it, unless one is forced to. He’s not the person for Sybil.... Why, no one knows anything about him. You can’t let a girl marry like that ... just any one who comes along. Besides, Mrs. Pulsifer writes me.... You remember her, Olivia, the Mannering boy’s aunt who used to have a house in Chestnut Street.... Well, she lives in Paris now at the Hotel Continental, and she writes me she’s discovered there’s some mystery about his mother. No one seems to know much about her.”
“Why,” said Olivia, “should she write you such a thing? What made her think you’d be interested?”
“Well, Kate Pulsifer and I went to school together and we still correspond now and then. I just happened to mention the boy’s name when I was writing her about Sabine. She says, by the way, that Sabine has very queer friends in Paris and that Sabine has never so much as called on her or asked her for tea. And there’s been some new scandal about Sabine’s husband and an Italian woman. It happened in Venice....”
“But he’s not her husband any longer.”
The old lady seated herself and went on pouring forth the news from Kate Pulsifer’s letter; with each word she appeared to grow stronger and stronger, less and less yellow and worn.
(“It must be,” thought Olivia, “the effect of so many calamities contained in one letter.”)
She saw now that she had acted only just in time and she was glad that she had lied, so flatly, so abruptly, without thinking why she had done it. For Mrs. Pulsifer was certain to go to the bottom of the affair, if for no other reason than to do harm to Sabine; she had once lived in a house on Chestnut Street with a bow-window which swept the entrance to every house. She was one of John Pentland’s dead, who lived by watching others live.
4
From the moment she encountered Mr. Gavin on the turnpike until the tragedy which occurred two days later, life at Pentlands appeared to lose all reality for Olivia. When she thought of it long afterward, the hours became a sort of nightmare in which the old enchantment snapped and gave way to a strained sense of struggle between forces which, centering about herself, left her in the end bruised and a little broken, but secure.