"Is she likely to suit?"
"My lady thinks so. Mr. Harry,"—dropping her voice to a whisper, which she, no doubt, thought would be inaudible to me, busy with the tea-cups at the table ever so far-off—"she knows all about that past trouble."
Mr. Chandos laid down his book and looked at her.
"Every unhappy syllable of it, sir; more than my lady knows herself," whispered Hill. "She mentioned one or two particulars to me which I'm sure we had never known; and she said she could tell my lady more than that."
"That is extraordinary," observed Mr. Chandos, in the same subdued tone. "Who is this Mrs. Penn? Whence could she have heard anything?"
"From Mrs. Sackville. You must remember her, sir. She stayed a week with us about that time."
"This comes of my mother's having made a confidant of Mrs. Sackville!" he muttered. "I always thought Mrs. Sackville a chattering woman. But it does not account for Mrs. Penn's knowing the particulars that my mother does not know," he added, after a pause. "I shall be curious to see Mrs. Penn."
"That's just the question I put to her, sir: where Mrs. Sackville could have learnt these details. Mrs. Penn answered that she had them from Sir Thomas himself. Therefore, I conclude, Sir Thomas must have revealed to her what he spared my lady."
Mr. Chandos shook his head with a proud, repellant air.
"I don't believe it, Hill. However Mrs. Sackville might have learnt them, rely upon it it was not from Sir Thomas. She was no favourite of his."