“I will,” he said quickly. “I will, my dear. But you know that till very lately I always did call him Garlett.”
As she was going towards the door, he called her back. “Do you feel, under the circumstances, that you ought to stay here in Terriford?”
“D’you want me to go away, Uncle Jock?”
He groaned. “Want you to go away? Don’t you know what a difference your coming here has made to me—as well as to your Aunt Jenny? We’ve never talked about it, even to one another, but it’s been the one blot on our happy married life that we had no child. You’ve become our child. Want you to go away!”
She walked up to him and put her hand through his arm. She was very moved, and for one fleeting moment she forgot Harry Garlett.
“Then why,” she faltered, “why did you say that cruel, cruel thing just now, Uncle Jock?—I mean about my leaving Bonnie Doon?”
“Because,” he answered painfully, “if you stay here your life will become unendurable between now and Harry’s trial. Your aunt and I have already talked it over. She suggests you and she going away together to some quiet spot where you can pass as Miss Maclean.”
“But why should I do that?” asked the girl in a bewildered tone. “I don’t understand.”
He looked at her and saw what she said was true—that she was still quite unaware of the tide of noisome gossip which had flowed over her name and her innocent, girlish past since the exhumation of Mrs. Garlett.
“I supposed,” he said slowly, “that you were aware, Jean, of what the people who believe Harry Garlett guilty take to have been his motive.”