Mrs. Hamlyn gazed at him. “Where were you born?”
“At Calcutta; that’s in India. Mamma brought me home in the Clipper of the Seas, and the ship went down, but quite everybody was not lost in it, though papa thought so.”
The boy had evidently been well instructed. Eliza Hamlyn, grasping the whole truth now, staggered in terror.
“Philip! Philip! is it true? Was it this you feared?”
He made a motion of assent and covered his face. “Heaven knows I would rather have died.”
He stood back against the window-curtains, that they might shade his pain. She fell into a chair and wished he had died, years before.
But what was to be the end of it all? Though Eliza Hamlyn went straight out and despatched that syren of the golden hair with a poison-tipped bodkin (and possibly her will might be good to do it), it could not make things any the better for herself.
III
New Year’s Night at Leet Hall, and the banquet in full swing—but not, as usual, New Year’s Eve.
Captain Monk headed his table, the parson, Robert Grame, at his right hand, Harry Carradyne on his left. Whether it might be that the world, even that out-of-the-way part of it, Church Leet, was improving in manners and morals; or whether the Captain himself was changing: certain it was that the board was not the free board it used to be. Mrs. Carradyne herself might have sat at it now, and never once blushed by as much as the pink of a seashell.