He spoke with his usual perfect simplicity, and as his old friend glanced at him she said to herself: “Just the same kind heart as always! Well, if others don’t, there’s one that does you justice, and that’s your old nurse, my dear.”
Aloud she said nothing in reply to his last words, and Michael, too, sat silent. He was stroking Solomon’s soft back half absently, and pondering something in his mind, which the sight of his dachshund had recalled to his memory. Should he, or should he not say anything to Mrs Shepton of the curiously similar way in which both mistress and maid had alluded to a former “Solomon of their own.”
“Have you seen anything of Mrs Marmaduke?” he said at last, tentatively.
“Miss Christine brought her in here for a few minutes yesterday,” answered Mrs Shepton. “Of course I had seen her before, several times, but not to speak to. She is a sweet-looking young lady, very, and so devoted to her little children. I am very pleased, indeed, that the family seems to be taking to her so much; Miss Headfort has quite cheered up over it.”
The tone of her words decided Michael to say no more. He could scarcely have related the little incident without a suggestion of something not altogether to the young wife’s advantage, though in what way he himself would have been utterly at a loss to define. And the faintest suggestion of such a kind would have been most unfair to young Mrs Headfort, for if her maid had a secret—a secret of which she herself even was cognisant, it would be most unjustifiable to lay to the young lady’s account any supposition of underhand dealing or subterfuge.
“I think she is—Mrs Marmaduke, I mean—a nice little woman, and certainly very pretty. I should not say she was particularly clever, but I daresay that doesn’t matter much in a woman if her looks are all right,” he said, with a slight superciliousness not lost on his hearer.
“Now, Master Michael, I am not going to have you beginning in that way,” she said, remonstratingly. “If a young lady is pretty, that’s no reason why she shouldn’t have other gifts as well. You would not like me to say Mr Gresham had nothing but his good looks?”
Again there was just a shade of bitterness in the young man’s voice as he replied:
“Nobody could say such a thing of Bernard. He has got—well, what is there he hasn’t got?”
Michael’s old nurse seemed rather nonplussed.