“Yes, suchpeck,” agreed Floss. “It was suchpeck; and what could it be aunty said she’d make for mamma, Uncle Beachey?” she continued, evidently disposed now to regard her hearer as an interpreter of the jumble in her brain. “It was something like satin flies.”
Captain Chancellor stared at the child without speaking. He saw, or thought he at last saw, through it all. He turned to go, but a thought occurred to him.
“Floss,” he said, very impressively, “it wasn’t good of you to listen to what your mamma and aunt were saying. They would be very angry if they knew.”
“Oh, don’t tell. Uncle Beachey, you said you wouldn’t tell nobody,” said the little girl beseechingly.
“I’m not going to tell. But remember, Floss, you must be sure not to tell any one else, not nurse or any one, do you hear? It doesn’t matter for me, but other people might scold you.”
“Then I won’t tell,” decided Floss. “And do you think Aunty Woma will go away, Uncle Beachey? I hope she will. I like her best when she goes away, for then she can’t call me a tiresome plague, and she bwings me a pwesent when she comes back.”
But Uncle Beachey did not answer her inquiries. His mind was full of curiously mingled feelings; indignation against Gertrude, triumph over Roma, whose real sentiments he now imagined he had discovered; determination to be, as he expressed it to himself, “made a fool of no longer.” And below all these he was conscious of a strange, indefinable feeling of indifference to it all, of unwillingness to move decisively in the matter, as he told himself he must. Now that the long-coveted prize seemed within his reach, half its attractiveness appeared to have deserted it.
“There has been a great deal of unnecessary to-do about it all,” he said to himself. “Of course I always felt sure that in the end I should marry Roma, and I have no doubt we shall get on very well. But it takes the bloom off a thing to have all this uncertainty and delay about it.”