"Well, I thought it might be as well for her not to see me here. I wish to call at Castle Wafer by accident, you understand."
Frederick St. John nodded. "Could you see her teeth and her glistening eyes? She was stealthily following Miss Beauclerc. For what purpose? I am thankful we were here."
"Where is Miss Beauclerc now?"
"She is coming on with the dean. I have cautioned her not to go out alone. Mr. Pym, what is to be done? This state of things cannot be allowed to go on. I call upon you, as a good and true man, to aid us, if it be in your power."
Mr. Pym made no reply. He walked on in his favourite attitude, his hands clasped behind his back, just as he was walking in that sorrowful chamber, the evening you first beheld him; and his face wore, to Mr. St. John's thinking, a strangely troubled look in the moonlight.
[CHAPTER XXXV.]
ON THE TERRACE
Mr. Pym went to the house alone. Frederick St. John met him in the hall as if by accident, and took him at once into the dining-room. Any suspicion that they had met before at the Rectory and come away from it together, was as far from the minds of the assembled company, as that they had both dropped from the clouds.
Mrs. St. John, who was better and had come down since dinner, Mrs. Beauclerc, Mrs. Carleton, and Sir Isaac, had sat down to whist. Mrs. Darling and Miss Denison were talking to each other at the centre table; Miss Denison abusing Georgina as the wildest girl in Christendom, Mrs. Darling protesting that she could not be half so wild as her own daughter Rose. Mrs. Darling was all wonder and astonishment when Mr. Pym came in. What could have brought him to Lexington?--how very kind of him to call and see her. And it was she who took him up to introduce him to Sir Isaac.
One moment's recoil, one startled look at the face, and Mrs. Carleton held out her hand to the little surgeon, and was her own calm and gracious self. Seated at whist there, opposite to Sir Isaac, her voice low and sweet, her manner so gentle and collected, it would never have entered into any one's mind to imagine that she had been gliding about stealthily in the moonlight like a ghost, or a female poacher on forbidden ground: and perhaps the surgeon might have been excused his momentary doubt whether it was really Mrs. Carleton that they had seen.