Michael Gresham raised his eyebrows.
“I am glad to hear that,” he said. “I was beginning to wonder what sort of people they could be to countenance such a proceeding, for this very moment I had come to tell you what I had grown sure of, that this most eccentric young lady’s-maid is no other than Mrs Marmaduke’s own sister—Miss Raynsworth.” And he hastily recapitulated the various twos and twos which had offered themselves to be made fours of, without any special efforts at detection or very great exercise of acuteness on his part.
Mrs Shepton looked considerably relieved, for the having acted on her impulse had already begun to frighten her a little.
“I shall be glad to tell Miss Raynsworth that you had found it all out,” she said, “when she has calmed down a little, and then she will not be vexed with me. She was sure you suspected something, and that was what brought it all out to-day. She is terribly frightened, and no wonder! And yet her pride makes her angry at the very idea of appealing to any one—to you, Mr Michael—to keep her secret, you see?”
“Yes, naturally; but what I don’t see is why I should be expected to do so. A girl who can behave so wildly, and in defiance of her parents, should be pulled up for it, and the sooner the better, I should say.”
His tone was hard; all the softness and geniality seemed to have melted out of his face. Mrs Shepton looked distressed. She began to feel as if by her appeal to him she had let the genii out of the bottle—not that she, good woman, would have thus expressed it—there was a look in her “boy’s” face which she had encountered more than once before in his progress from babyhood to manhood, and which meant a good deal beyond what she was able to cope with.
“Master Michael, my dear,” she began, sitting down as she spoke, and motioning him to a seat beside her, “you don’t understand. Wait till you hear the whole, and all that the poor, dear young lady had in her mind;” and trying not to seem too eager in her defence of Philippa, for she was not without experience in the “little ways” of the sterner sex, the housekeeper related with considerable detail all that she had learnt from Miss Raynsworth as to the home life of her family, her sisterly devotion and not unreasonable anxiety about Evelyn at the present crisis, all—down even to the little difficulties which had attended the efforts to find a suitable attendant to accompany Mrs Marmaduke Headfort to Wyverston. She drew, too, a touching picture of Philippa’s anguish of mind on receiving the sternly disapproving letter from her parents.
“Poor dear, I couldn’t but feel for her, however rash and foolish she may have been, when she looked up at me so piteous-like through her tears, and said, ‘Don’t speak of mamma; she has never been really angry with me before in my life.’ It quite went to my heart, Master Michael, but of course that’s a woman’s way of looking at it, I know,” she added, diplomatically.
Michael emitted an indefinite sound, something between a “humph,” and a “pshaw,” but the lines of his face had softened; there was a touch of amusement, too, in his eyes as he glanced up.
“She is a very silly girl,” he said, at last, “and a very bad actress, though I don’t know that I like her any the less for that.—Eh, Solomon, what do you say to it, old boy? You saw through her from the first, didn’t you?—Solomon is very fastidious in his friendships, you know, Mrs Shepton, ma’am, and he took to her at once, as I have told you.”