"May I stay and talk to you?" Hester said.
"You shall stay, dear, certainly, if you think it right; but I see everything from my window, and Harry Vernon has just gone in to see your mother. Do you know?"
"I saw him coming," Hester said, with a cloud upon her face, which looked like displeasure, but was indeed the trouble of her self-discussion and doubt as to what she should do.
"Something is wrong," said the old lady, "and you have come to tell me. Are you going to marry Harry Vernon, Hester?"
"Would that be something wrong?" cried the girl, looking up quickly, with a certain irritation. She did not mean to have so important a question fore-judged in this easy way.
"That is according as you feel, my dear; but I fear he is not good enough for you. Catherine says——"
Now the Morgans were altogether of Catherine's faction, being her relations, and not—as the other members of the community remembered with much resentment—Vernons at all. It was a sinful use of the family property as concentrated in Catherine's hand, to support these old people who had no right to it. More or less this was the sentiment of the community generally, even, it is to be feared, of Mrs. John herself; and consequently, as an almost infallible result, they were on Catherine's side, and took her opinions. Hester stopped the mouth of the old lady, so to speak, hastily holding up her hand.
"That is a mistake," she cried; "Catherine is quite wrong! She does not like him; but he is honest as the skies—he is good. You must not think badly of him because Catherine has a prejudice against him."
"That is a rash thing for you to say. Catherine is a great deal older, and a great deal wiser than you."
"She may be older, and she may be wiser; but she does not know everything," said Hester. "There is one prejudice of hers you don't share—she thinks the same of me."