"Oh yes, Mr. St. John has come. He has come often."
With the answer, Mrs. Darling quitted the room for the chamber of her unconsciously offending daughter. The poor girl woke up, hot and startled at the unexpected entrance; at the sharp questions that so rudely assailed her ear. Not for some few moments did she understand sufficiently to answer.
Mr. Carleton St. John? Yes, he had been there rather frequently in the past few weeks. Had Charlotte had opportunities of seeing him alone? Yes, very likely she had; it might be so.
"Did you know," resumed Mrs. Darling, suppressing the storm of reproaches so ready to break from her lips, "that any attachment was arising between her and Mr. St. John?"
"No, mamma, I never knew it," replied Mary Anne, fully awake now. "I did not think of such a thing. Has it arisen?"
"Yes, it has arisen, you unhappy, careless creature, and I fear that she's going to marry him," retorted Mrs. Darling. "You are a hundred years older than Charlotte in staid experience. I entrusted her to your charge here as I might a younger sister, and you have suffered her to meet George St. John, and this is the result! I shall never forgive you, Mary Anne. Did I not warn you that I would have no single men calling here during my absence?"
"But--but--Mr. St. John is not a single man," returned the unfortunate Mary Anne, too bewildered to collect her senses. "I'm sure I did not think of him as anything but a widower steeped in grief. It seems only the other day that his wife died. I did not think of him at all as a marrying man."
Neither, in point of fact, had Mrs. Darling, or she might have expressly interdicted his visits by name, as she had those of others.
Mary Anne Darling was collecting her wits. She sat up in bed, thinking possibly that might help her. "Mamma, you cannot really expect to keep Charlotte unmarried! Remember her beauty. If it were me or Margaret, you might----"
"You or Margaret!" screamed Mrs. Darling, excessively incensed at something or other in the words. "I wish you were both going to be married tomorrow! or tonight, for the matter of that."