She looked at him with a deep red rising over her cheeks, and a half-defiant look. “I am old enough to be your mother, you need not hesitate to speak before me,” she said.
“It is not that; it is that I can’t associate that name with anything—anything—to be ashamed of.”
“I would hope not, indeed!” she cried, standing up, towering over him as if she had added a foot to her height. She gave forth a long fiery breath, and then asked, “Did he dare to say that?” with a heaving breast.
“He did not say it: but my guardian thought——”
“Oh, your guardian thought! That was what your guardian would naturally think. A man—that is always of an evil mind where women are concerned! And what did she think?—her, his wife, the other guardian, the woman I have seen?”
“She is not like any one else,” said young Gordon; “she will never believe in any harm. You have given me one scene, I will give you another. She said what Desdemona said, ‘I do not believe there was ever any such woman’.”
“Bless her! But oh, there are—there are!” cried Miss Bethune, tears filling her eyes, “in life as well as in men’s ill imaginations. But not possible to her or to me!”
CHAPTER XI.
Young Gordon had gone, and silence had fallen over Miss Bethune’s room. It was a commonplace room enough, well-sized, for the house was old and solid, with three tall windows swathed in red rep curtains, partially softened but not extinguished by the white muslin ones which had been put up over them. Neither Miss Bethune nor her maid belonged to the decorative age. They had no principles as to furniture, but accepted what they had, with rather a preference than otherwise for heavy articles in mahogany, and things that were likely to last. They thought Mr. Mannering’s dainty furniture and his faded silken curtains were rather of the nature of trumpery. People could think so in these days, and in the locality of Bloomsbury, without being entirely abandoned in character, or given up to every vicious sentiment. Therefore, I cannot say, as I should be obliged to say now-a-days, in order to preserve any sympathy for Miss Bethune in the reader’s mind, that the room was pretty, and contained an indication of its mistress’s character in every carefully arranged corner. It was a room furnished by Mrs. Simcox, the landlady. It had been embellished, perhaps, by a warm hearthrug—not Persian, however, by any means—and made comfortable by a few easy chairs. There were a number of books about, and there was one glass full of wallflowers on the table, very sweet in sober colours—a flower that rather corresponds with the mahogany, and the old-fashioned indifference to ornament and love of use. You would have thought, had you looked into this room, which was full of spring sunshine, bringing out the golden tints in the wallflower, and reflected in the big mirror above the fireplace, that it was empty after young Gordon had gone. But it was not empty. It was occupied instead by a human heart, so overbursting with passionate hope, love, suspense, and anxiety, that it was a wonder the silence did not tinge, and the quiet atmosphere betray that strain and stress of feeling. Miss Bethune sat in the shadowed corner between the fireplace and the farther window, with the whiteness of the curtains blowing softly in her face as the air came in. That flutter dazzled the beholder, and made Gilchrist think when she entered that there was nobody there. The maid looked round, and then clasped her hands and said to herself softly: “She’ll be gane into her bedroom to greet there".
“And why should I greet, you foolish woman?” cried Miss Bethune from her corner, with a thrill in her voice which betrayed the commotion in her mind.