‘The first wife,’ said Mrs. Jenkinson; ‘poor thing, I have always heard she died very young, but never before that she left a child.’
‘Few people are so clever as to hear everything. You perceive that it was the case, nevertheless,’ Mrs. Hayward said, with a sparkle in her eyes.
‘And I hear you are plunging her into all sorts of gaiety, and that there is a follower, as the maids say, already, or something very like one—a Scotch officer, or something of that sort. You are not so pleased to have her, but what you would be resigned to get rid of her, I suppose.’
‘I can’t tell what you suppose, or what you may have heard,’ said the Colonel’s wife. ‘I hope I will do my duty to my husband’s daughter whatever the circumstances may be.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean to throw any doubt upon that; but we were very surprised,’ Mrs. Jenkinson said.
In the meantime the Canon had withdrawn to the other side of the room and called Joyce to him, who had been considerably alarmed by the beginning of this interchange of hostilities. ‘Come here and talk to me,’ he said. ‘You have not kept faith with me. I have got a crow to pluck with you, my new parishioner. You went to that affair of the Sitwells after all.’
‘My father took me,’ said Joyce, with natural evasion; and then she added, ‘but there was no reason I should not go.’
‘Here’s a little rebel,’ said the Canon; ‘not only flies in my face, but tells me there’s no reason why she shouldn’t. Come, now, answer me my question. Are you a good Churchwoman—they turn out very good Church principles in Scotland when they are of the right sort—or are you a horrid little Presbyterian? you wouldn’t answer me the other day.’
‘I am a—horrid Presbyterian,’ Joyce said, with an unusual amusement and sense of humour breaking through her shyness and strangeness. The Canon was the first person who had touched any natural chord in her.
‘I thought as much,’ he said. ‘Hayward, here’s a pretty business. As if it were not enough to have a nest of rebels conspiring under my very nose, here’s a little revolutionary with no respect for any constituted authority whom you’ve brought among us. But I must teach you the error of your ways. You shall come and hear me preach my famous sermon on Calvin, and if after that you find you have a leg to stand upon—but I suppose you’re ready to go to the stake for your religion, however wrong it may be proved to be?’