“Now, Johnny, don’t be a muff. Somebody you thought dead! What on earth’s come to you, lad? Speak out!”
“It is Nash Caromel’s first wife, sir: Charlotte Tinkle.”
The pater gazed at me as a man bereft of reason. I don’t believe he knew whether he stood on his head or his heels. “Charlotte Tinkle!” he exclaimed, backing against the curtain. “What, come to life, Johnny?”
“Yes, sir, and she wants to see you. Perhaps she has never been dead.”
“Bless my heart and mind! Bring her in.”
The first thing Charlotte the First did when she came in and the Squire clasped her by her two hands, was to burst into a fit of sobbing. Some wine stood on the sideboard; the Squire poured her out a glass, and she untied the strings of her bonnet as she sat down.
“If I might take it off for a minute?” she said. “I have had it on all the way from Liverpool.”
“Do so, my dear. Goodness me! I think I must be in a dream. And so you are not dead!”
“Yes, I knew it was what you must have all been thinking,” she answered, stifling her sobs. “Poor Nash!—what a dreadful thing it is! I cannot imagine how the misconception can have arisen.”
“What misconception?” asked the pater, whose wits, once gone a wool-gathering, rarely came back in a hurry.