"Do you call this the garden?" cried Minnie, her voice so deep with alarm and presentiment that it sounded bass, in the silence of the night. "Six miles off, and an open carriage, and coming among people who are themselves in mourning! It ought to have given her a lesson to see my mother in her cap."
"If you have nothing better to do than to find fault with Lady Markland——" said Theo, pale with passion.
"Oh," cried Minnie, "don't suppose I am going to speak about Lady Markland to you. How can you be so infatuated, Theo? You a tutor,—you, that have always been made such a fuss with, as if there was not such another in the world! What was it all he was to be? A first class, and a Fellow, and I don't know what. But tutor to a small boy, tutor to a little lord,—a sort of a valet, or a sort of a nurse—"
"Minnie! your brother is at an age when he must choose for himself."
"How much are you to have for it?" she cried,—"how much a year? Or are you to be paid with presents, or only with the credit of the connection? Oh, I am glad poor papa is dead, not to hear of it. He would have known what to think of it all. He would have given you his opinion of a woman—of a woman——"
"Lady Markland is a very nice woman," said Chatty. "Oh, Theo, don't look as if you were going to strike her! She doesn't know what she is saying. She has lost her temper. It is just Minnie's way."
"Of a woman who wears no crape for her husband," cried Minnie, with an effort, in her bass voice.
Theo, who had looked, indeed, as if he might have knocked his sister down, here burst into an angry peal of laughter, which rang through the house; and his mother, seizing the opportunity, took him by the arm and drew him away. "Don't take any notice," she said. "You must not forget she is your sister, whatever she says. And, my dear boy, though Minnie exaggerates, she has reason on her side, from her point of view. No, I don't think as she does, altogether; but, Theo, can't you understand that it is a disappointment to us? We always made so sure you were going to do some great thing."
"And to be of a little real use once in a way, is such a small thing!"
"Oh, Theo, you must be reasonable, and think a little. It does not want a scholar like you to teach little Geoff."