“Where did you and Dicky go just now, Sam?”
Sam turned short round at the query. Charlotte Knox, as she put it, carried suspicion in her low tone.
“Where did I and Dicky go?” repeated Sam, rather taken aback. “I—I only stepped out for a stroll in the moonlight. I don’t know anything about Dicky.”
“I saw Dicky run out to the garden first, and you went next,” persisted Charlotte, who was just as keen as steel. “Dick, what was there to see? I will give you two helpings of trifle at supper if you tell me.”
For two helpings of trifle Dick would have sold his birthright. “Such fun!” he cried, beginning to jump. “She was out there with the captain, Lotty: he came to the window here and beckoned to her: I saw him. I dodged them round and round the laurels, and I am pretty nearly sure he kissed her.”
“Who was?—who did?” But the indignant glow on Lotty’s face proved that she scarcely needed to put the question.
“That nasty Mina. She took and told that it was me who eat up the big bowl of raspberry cream in the larder to-day; and mother went and believed her!”
Charlotte Knox, her brow knit, her head held erect, walked away after giving us all a searching look apiece. “I, like Dicky, saw Collinson call her out, and I thought I might as well see what he wanted to be after,” Sam whispered to me. “I did not see Dicky at all, though, until he came into the laurels with you.”
“He is talking to her now,” I said, directing Sam’s attention to the captain.
“I wonder whether I ought to tell Dr. Knox?” resumed Sam. “What do you think, Johnny Ludlow? She is so young, and somehow I don’t trust him. Dan doesn’t, either.”