For a moment Jimmy stared at me, and then he burst into shouts of laughter.
“Well done, Anne!” he said, rolling on my poor verbena. “Well done, Dulcie. That little slyboots. Thirty thousand a year. What a score. Who would have thought it, Anne! You look so remote and unworldly in your grey hair, stitching away at your woolwork picture. But you’ve outwitted Gertrude. Well, I don’t care what she says. I’m glad of any luck happening to Dulcie. She is not fit to struggle for herself in this hard world. But Gertrude will never forgive you, Anne. You may make up your mind to that.”
“But what have I done?” I bleated. “Nothing. I’m as innocent as an unlaid egg.”
“You may be, but she will never forgive you all the same,” said Jimmy slowly rising, and brushing traces of verbena from his person. “Stupid people never forgive, and they always avenge themselves by brute force.”
Old Miss Jones, bewildered and tearful, toddled down to see me, boring me to death with plans for leaving Banff and settling in Bournemouth with a married niece. Joan rushed down, boisterously happy, and confident that her father would give in; Jimmy, weakening daily, came down. Mr. Wilson called, modest and hopeful; Dulcie, and the children came down, Mr. Vavasour, a stooping youth, with starling eyes, and an intense manner, motored over.
But Gertrude never came.
I consoled myself with Mr. Vavasour. There was no doubt he was in love with Dulcie, and I surmised that in the future, if she could not dominate him, his aunt by marriage might be able to do so. I can’t say whether Dulcie cared much about him, but I told her firmly that she was very much in love, and she said, “Yes, yes, Aunt Anne.”
That was what was so endearing about Dulcie.
She was so obliging; always ready to run upstairs for my spectacles, or to marry anybody.