"We have seen a great deal of Mr. Cavendish, and he has been very nice, but I did not like the idea of going to the Isle of Wight."
"Oh no, mamma," Chatty repeated, with more firmness. "I did not wish it at all."
"I am very glad you think with me, my dear. He has been very nice; he has made us enjoy our time in town much more than we should have done. But of course, that cannot last for ever, and I do really think now that we should go home."
"I have always thought so," said Chatty. She was rather pale, and there was a sort of new-born dignity about her, with which her mother felt that she was unacquainted. "It has been very pleasant, but I am quite ready. And then Minnie will be coming back as you said."
"Yes." Then Mrs. Warrender burst into a laugh which might as well have been a fit of crying. "But you must prepare yourself to see not Minnie, but the Eustace Thynnes," she said. And then the mother and daughter kissed each other and retired to their respective rooms, where Chatty was a long time going to bed. She sat and thought, with her pretty hair about her shoulders, going over a great many things, recalling a great many simple little scenes and words said,—which were but words after all,—and then of a sudden the tears came, and she sat and cried very quietly, even in her solitude making as little fuss as possible, with an ache of wonder at the trouble that had come upon her, and a keen pang of shame at the thought that she had expected more than was coming, more perhaps than had ever been intended. A man is not ashamed of loving when he is not loved, however angry he may be with himself or the woman who has beguiled him; but the sharpest smart in a girl's heart is the shame of having given what was not asked for, what was not wanted. When those tears had relieved her heart, Chatty put up her hair very neatly for the night, just as she always did, and after a while slept,—much better than Dick.
He came next day, however, for a final visit, and the day after to see them away, without any apparent breach in the confidence and friendship with which they regarded each other. There might be, perhaps, a faint almost imperceptible difference in Chatty, a little dignity like that which her mother had discovered in her, something that was not altogether the simple girl, younger than her years, whom Mrs. Warrender had brought to town. On the very last morning of all, Dick had also a look which was not very easy to be interpreted. While they were on their way to the station he began suddenly to talk of Underwood and the Wilberforces, as if he had forgotten them all this time, and now suddenly remembered that there were such people in the world. "Did I ever tell you," he said, "that one of the houses in the parish belongs to an uncle of mine, who bought it merely as an investment, and let it?"
"We were talking of that," said Mrs. Warrender. "Mr. Wilberforce hoped you had persuaded your uncle to leave the drainage alone in order to make a nuisance and drive undesirable tenants away."
He laughed in a hurried, breathless way, then said quickly, "Is it true that the people who were there are gone?"
"Quite true. They seem to have melted away without any one knowing, in a single night. They were not desirable people."
"So I heard: and gone without leaving any sign?"