"I wonder if he knows about her affair with Laura's husband," Miss Spencer ruminated. "Some one ought to tell him, just out of kindness." (And the very next day an anonymous letter did tell him, for which he was duly grateful.)
"I hope she will make you happy," Miss Mary Graham told her cousin, sighing.
"Well, Arthur will make her happy," Miss Eliza said, decidedly; "and that's what he cares about! As for her making him happy, it will be his own fault if she doesn't. She'll interest you, Arthur—that's what a man like you wants."
"I'm to be 'amused,' am I?" Arthur Weston said, grimly. "But suppose I don't 'amuse' her?" And as the older sister went out to the door with him to say good-by, he added: "Am I a thief? Of course, I've got the best of the bargain."
She did not contradict him. "I think," she said, her face full of pain and pity, "that Fred has got the very best bargain that, being Fred, she could possibly get."
"No!" he said, "you're wrong! But pray God she never finds it out."
He did not mean to let her find it out!
But that afternoon when he went into No. 15 for his tea and for a chance to look at Frederica, and tease her, and feel her frank arm over his shoulder, he was very silent.
They were in the sitting-room, Mrs. Payton having tactfully withdrawn to the entry outside of Morty's room. "When I was a young lady," she told Miss Carter, "I used to receive Mr. Payton in the back parlor, and Mama always sat in the front parlor. But Mama was very old-fashioned—I believe in the new ideas! And then, after all, Mr. Weston is so much older than Freddy—oh, dear me! What a blessing it was to have him fall in love with her!"