“If Mr. Pickering is able to speak with us for a little while, you may leave us with him.”
“No, no,” interrupted the invalid in an astonishingly strong and hearty voice. “There’s nothing to be said that Betsy needn’t hear. Is there, lass?”
She began to tremble, and lifted a corner of her apron. Notwithstanding her faithless swain’s statement to her sister, she was quite as good-looking as Kitty, and sorrow had given her face a pathetic dignity that in no wise diminished its charm.
She knew not whether to stay or go. The superintendent took the hint given by the squire.
“It would be best, under the circumstances, if we were left alone while we talk over last night’s affair, Mr. Pickering.”
“Not a bit of it. Don’t go, Betsy. What is there to talk over? I made a fool of myself—not for the first time where a woman was concerned—and Betsy here, brought from Hereford by a meddlesome scamp, lost her temper. No wonder! Poor girl, she had traveled all day in a hot train, without eatin’ a bite, and found me squeezing her sister at the bottom of the garden. There’s no denying that she meant to do me a mischief, and serve me right, too. I’ll admit I was scared, and in running away I got into worse trouble, as, of course, I could easily have mastered her. Kitty, too, what between fear and shame, lost her senses, and poor Betsy cut her own arm. You see, a plain tale stops all the nonsense that has been talked since ten o’clock last night.”
“Not quite, George.” Mr. Beckett-Smythe was serious and magisterial. “You forget, or perhaps do not know, that there were witnesses.”
Pickering looked alarmed.
“Witnesses!” he cried. “What d’you mean?”