"Dear Peter," touched by this beautiful confidence in her affection. "Only I do hope you are both quite sure."
She wasn't a bit sure herself.
* * * * * *
Phyllis did nothing to decrease her uneasiness. That lady proved to be pale-faced and regular of profile, with quick dark eyes which never came to rest on any one object for long. Mrs. Carmichael had a weakness for people who looked at you, as she was in the habit of saying, "dead straight in the face." In thinking it out Ferlie remembered that very few ever did. Why should they? And, of those few more than one had been proved, later, own brother to Ananias. But, whether or no Phyllis was own sister to Sapphira, she scarcely glanced at Ferlie in shaking hands. She might, decided Peter's sister, be incessantly calculating sums in mental arithmetic. The fluttering of her eyelids apparently shut out visions which sought to steal between her brain and the addition and subtraction.
The interview was hardly a screaming success. Ferlie was irresistibly and unreasonably reminded of Muriel Vane and wondered, depressedly, on the way home, if she were going to develop into one of those women who mistrust their own sex.
She was Aunt Brillianna's guest at the time, and the latter swiftly noticed her problematical silences, but put them down to anxiety over the mail which brought distressing news of Mr. Carmichael. The doctors talked sagely of an operation and he was taking sick leave.
"If he should have to retire now he won't get his 'K,'" Ferlie reminded Aunt B., reading from her mother's inconsequent scrawl.
Aunt B. dryly tendered it as her opinion that the Family of Carmichael was great enough to survive that loss. "Leave us our nobility" had best described her attitude since the Houses of Trefusis and Carmichael had united. The ancestral title would ever carry more weight with her than any that might possibly be earned or bought by some Son of Trade with nothing to recommend him but Board School brains or a Bank Balance.
Ferlie, however, received a clearer idea of the workings of her mother's mind.
One returned from Exile with letters after one's name, the reward of thirty-odd years of labour, and in Europe people knew not what they meant nor even the order in which to write them. The Handle, an unmistakeable sign of services rendered, they could understand and respect, whether or no the man who wore it had received the just reward of his deeds.