"Having snubbed me badly since that night. No, I acknowledge that you have kept your resolution pretty fairly. But then, you know, it was impossible not to see it was an effort all the time. If you could forget all this about the servants, and let us be the sort of friends we might have been if Gabrielle had never meddled, you would lay me under another obligation, and a more binding one than any of the others, great as they have been."
Mr. Andrews was talking very earnestly, and in a manner unusual to him. One could not help seeing that nothing short of the events of yesterday could have made it possible for him to speak so. His heart had been jarred open, as it were, by the great shock, and had not yet closed up again. It wouldn't take many hours more to do it; Missy realized that perhaps he wouldn't speak so again in his life; the moment was precious to her, because, whether she liked him or not, there is a pleasure in looking into reserved people's hearts; one knows it cannot happen every day.
And that was the moment that Miss Varian chose for coming into the parlor, with Goneril and Jay and the kittens. She had heard his voice, and she naturally wished to hear all about the affair of the pursuit. Goneril was nothing loth, and Jay was quite willing to go if the kittens went, so here the party were. Missy involuntarily bit her lips. Mr. Andrews' forehead contracted into a frown as he got up and spoke to Miss Varian, who settled herself comfortably into a chair.
"Now," she said taking her fan from Goneril, and getting her footstool into the right place, "now let us hear all about it."
Mr. Andrews, with a hopelessly shut-up look, said he didn't think there was much to tell.
"Not much to tell!" she echoed. "Why, there's enough to fill a novel. I never came so near to a romance in my life. I positively wouldn't have missed yesterday for a thousand dollars. It gives one such emotions to know so much is going on beside one, Mr. Andrews."
Mr. Andrews didn't deny her statement, nor a great many others that she made, but he seemed to find it very difficult to satisfy her curiosity. In fact, she got very little out without mining for it. She asked the hour when they first sighted the barque, and she got it. Two o'clock. Then the course they took, and the changes of the wind, and the deviations that she made, and the reasons that they did not gain upon her for an hour or more. All this might have been interesting to a sea-faring mind, but not to Miss Varian's. She asked questions and got answers, but she fretted and didn't seem to find herself much ahead. Missy knew Mr. Andrews had come over to tell her all about it—but not Miss Varian. He really did not mean to be obstinate, but he couldn't tell the story with the others present. Missy gathered a few bald facts, to be filled out later from the narrative of others. She didn't feel a consuming curiosity. Jay was here, the woman wasn't. That was enough for the present. She felt a far greater interest in those few words Mr. Andrews had been interrupted in saying. They went over and over in her mind. She only half attended to Miss Varian's catechism.
"Well," cried Goneril, who was hopelessly jolted out of her place by the events of yesterday, "well, one would think you'd had a child stolen every other day this summer, by the way you take it. Captain Symonds, over on the Neck, made twice the fuss about his calf, last autumn. I don't believe yet he talks about much else."
Miss Varian gave her maid a sharp reprimand, and asked Mr. Andrews another question in the same breath.
"How did the French woman act when the warrant was served on her?"