"No?" said Catherine rather wistfully.
She looked into his doubtful eyes across the breakfast table, and, perhaps for the first time, began to feel that she was not so very certain as she had once been as to what her boy meant. Was it possible after all, that perhaps the words upon which they agreed had different meanings to each? But this was only a passing cloud.
"Who was the belle?" she said smiling; "you can tell me that, at least, if you can't tell who you admired most."
Edward paused; and then an impulse of audacity seized him.
"I don't know if you will like it," he said, "but if I must tell the truth, I think that girl at the Vernonry—Hester, you know, who is grown up, it appears, and out—"
Catherine bore the little shock with great self-possession, but she felt it.
"Hester. Why should you suppose I would not like it? She must be nineteen, and, of course, she is out. And what of her?" Catherine said, with a grave smile.
She was vexed that Edward should be the one to tell her of the girl's success, and she was vexed, too, that he should think it would displease her. Why should it displease her? He ought to have kept silence on the subject, and he ought not to have seemed to know that she had any feeling upon it: the suggestion hurt her pride.
"Ellen seems to have taken her up. She has grown up much handsomer than I should have expected, and she was very well dressed, with beautiful pearls——"
"Ah!" said Catherine, with a long breath; "then her mother kept her pearls!" She laughed a moment after, and added, "Of course, she would; what could I have expected? She kept her settlement. Poor little thing! I suppose she did not understand what it meant, and that she was cheating her husband's creditors."