Suddenly Charlotte gave a little scream.
“Jerry, don’t. How can you, Jerry?”
“What’s the matter?” asked Mr Waldron.
“He pinched me, papa, quite sharply, under my cloak,” said Charlotte, a little ashamed of her excitement. “Jerry, how can you be so babyish?”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” said Jerry penitently. “It was only—when papa said that—I thought—there’s another thing.”
“Has the moonlight affected your brain, Jerry?” asked his father.
“No, papa; Charlotte understands. I thought perhaps she’d rather I didn’t say it right out. It makes three things, you see—being stupid—and perhaps the haunted room and Lady Mildred being horrid to her. You see, Charlotte?”
But Mr Waldron’s face—what they could see of it, that is to say, for the clouds seemed to be reassembling in obedience to some invisible summons, and a thick dark one, just at that moment, was beginning to veil the moon’s fair disc—expressed unmitigated bewilderment.
“He means what we were talking about this afternoon, papa. Jerry, you are too silly to tell it in that muddled way,” said Charlotte, laughing in spite of her irritation. “I said it seemed as if that girl had everything, and Jerry thinks nobody has. He said perhaps she’s not very clever, and it’s true one kind of pretty people are generally rather dull; and perhaps there’s a haunted room at Silverthorns, and she may be frightened at night; and now he means that perhaps Lady Mildred isn’t really very kind. But they’re all perhapses.”
“One isn’t,” said Mr Waldron. “There is a haunted room at Silverthorns—that, I have always known. If the poor girl is nervous, let us hope she doesn’t sleep near it! As to her being ‘dull’—no, I doubt it. She hasn’t the kind of large, heavy, striking beauty which goes with dullness.”