“I don’t think so,” said Evelyn. “When I’m talking about you to Mr Gresham, I feel quite comfortable! I quite forget about you being here, and think of you as if you were at home. Of course,” looking a little ashamed of herself, “I have said once or twice: ‘How I do wish she were here!’ thinking of you as your proper self, you know.”
Philippa looked very grave. She did not like the idea of any such prevarication on her sister’s part, and was on the point of saying so, till a moment’s reflection reminded her that she had scarcely a right to do so. So she contented herself with remarking quietly that in future she begged her sister to avoid all mention of her name.
“I cannot promise anything of the kind,” said Evelyn. “Mr Gresham has got interested in you now, and I am—” She stopped short.
“Well, what?” asked Philippa.
Evelyn blushed a little.
“Interested in his interest, I suppose,” she admitted, with a little laugh. “I cannot help wondering,” she went on, “when or where, or how, you and he may meet again. I am sure you would have so much in common,” and it did not require much flight of imagination on the younger sister’s part to see whither Evelyn’s thoughts were tending.
She was both touched and annoyed, the practical effect of this conversation being to make her wish more devoutly than ever that their time at Wyverston were over. Other feelings were strongly influencing her in this wish. For utterly unreasonable as she knew it to be, she was conscious of a curious resentment against Michael Gresham, whom she had not been able to avoid meeting—thanks generally to Solomon now and then, either on the moor or nearer home, for tacitly accepting her present personality, even while in a sense grateful to him for doing so. For that he had guessed some part of her secret, guessed, at least, that she had a secret, she felt perfectly sure, and the consciousness of this irritated her and reacted in curiously contradictory and capricious ways.
Fortunately, as she told herself, though here, too, her inconsistency came in, she had never come across the elder of the two cousins. Evelyn’s dissertations made her doubly careful as regarded him, yet she had a worrying curiosity to see him again, if only she could do so, herself unseen. And but for an additional reason for precaution which reached her a day or two later through her sister, she might have been tempted to some more or less reckless step for the gratification of this same curiosity, absurd and contemptible though she called it to herself.
This new danger lay in the discovery of the fact that should fate lead to the two Greshams laying their heads together about “Miss Raynsworth,” her identity with Michael’s fellow-traveller would be by no means unlikely to suggest itself.
Evelyn was full of her last piece of interesting information concerning Mr Bernard Gresham when she came up to bed a night or two after the conversation already recorded.