“I don’t mean to chaff you—upon my word, I don’t,” said Mr Cheviott, looking up innocently. “All I mean is that, whatever my news is, I am not going to tell you any more of it at present. It is much better not, and you will see so yourself afterwards.”
“You meant to tell me all when you first got the letter?” said Arthur.
“Well, yes, I don’t know but that I did. But I have changed my mind.”
“Is it—no, it cannot be—that there is any truth in that absurd nonsense that Miss Winstanley was telling us?”
“Why should you ask? It bore on the face of it that it was absurd nonsense,” replied Mr Cheviott. “Do, Arthur, trust me. You have done so in important things. Can’t you leave me to tell you about Mrs Brabazon’s letter after you have been at Hathercourt?”
“Very well. Needs must, I suppose,” said Arthur, lightly.
But he was not without misgivings during his long ride to the Rectory.
“I wish that idiotic old maid had kept her gossip to herself instead of writing it off to Miss Winstanley,” he said to himself more than once, and when he got close to Hathercourt he felt so nervously apprehensive of what he might be going to hear, that the relief of meeting, or rather overtaking Mary within a few yards of the house was very great.
Mary had no hat or bonnet on—she had just run out to gather some fresh green for the simple nosegays her father liked to see from his sofa. She was already in mourning for her young cousin, and as she looked up with a bright flush of pleasure to return Captain Beverley’s greeting, he could not help thinking that, though “not Lilias,” she was certainly very pretty.
“That black dress surely shows her off to advantage,” he said to himself, “or else she has grown prettier than she used to be. What a queer fellow Laurence is—fancy being shut up at the Edge for three weeks with a girl like that, and emerging as great a misogynist as before!”