‘They are so silly, all those revolutionary ways!’
‘And then Captain Bellendean, who should have known better, dangling after her everywhere—compromising the girl, I always said.’
‘Oh, we always knew,’ said Lady St. Clair, with a smile, ‘that nothing would come of that. A young man, of course, will take his amusement where he can find it—and if a girl allows herself to be compromised it is her own fault.’
‘The parents are most to blame, I think,’ another lady said.
‘The parents!’ said Miss St. Clair, with a laugh.
‘My dear Mrs. John—a mere matter of adoption, and not a successful one. Mrs. Hayward, I believe, never approved of it. It was all the Colonel’s doing—a foolish fancy about a resemblance.’
‘And who was she, then, to begin with?’
‘A foundling—picked up by the roadside—adopted by some cottagers—the lowest of the low.’
‘Oh!’ cried Miss Marsham, behind backs, with a cry of pain. ‘Poor child, poor dear!—if it is so, it’s not her fault.’
Mrs. Sitwell had grown pale. She was not done up in velvet strings like Lady Thompson, who sat gasping, making vain efforts to release herself, unable to speak. ‘I don’t think it is so bad as that. I never said—I was never told—only poor people, that was all—poor village people—very respectable. And everything to Joyce’s credit, or I never should have said a word.’