“Meaning nobody else,” was the tart rejoinder.
“He just has,” said Harriet. “Prior’s Ash is saying such things that it raises one’s hair to hear them. We don’t like to repeat them again, only just among ourselves.”
“What’s the drift of ’em?” inquired Margery.
“All sorts of drifts. About his having took and made away with the money in the tills: and those bonds of my Lord Averil’s, that there was so much looking after—it was he took them. Who’d have believed it, Margery, of Mr. George Godolphin, with his gay laugh and his handsome face?”
“Better for him if his laugh had been a bit less gay and his face less handsome,” was the sharp remark of Margery. “He might have been steadier then.”
“Folks talk of the Verralls, and that set, up at Lady Godolphin’s Folly,” rejoined Harriet, her voice falling still lower. “Prior’s Ash says he has had too much to do with them, and——”
“I don’t want that scandal repeated over to me,” angrily reprimanded Margery. “Perhaps other people know as much about it as Prior’s Ash; they have eyes, I suppose. There’s no need for you to bring it up to one’s face.”
“But they talk chiefly about Mr. Verrall,” persisted Harriet, with a stress upon the name. “It’s said that he and master have had business dealings together of some sort, and that that’s where the money’s gone. I was not going to bring up anything else. The man downstairs—and upon my word, Margery, he’s a decent man enough, if you can only forget who he is—says that there are thousands and thousands gone into Verrall’s pockets, which ought to be in master’s.”
“They’d ruin a saint, and I have always said it,” was Margery’s angry remark. “See her tearing about with her horses and her carriages, in her feathers and her brass; and master after her! Many’s the time I’ve wondered that Mr. Godolphin has put up with it. I’d have given him a word of a sort, if I had been his brother.”
“I should if I’d been his wife——” Harriet was beginning, but Margery angrily arrested her. Her own tongue might be guilty of many slips in the heat of argument; but it was high treason for Harriet to lapse into them.