‘Why not?’ he said. ‘You are as well qualified to judge as any one I know; and even your surprise throws a little new light for me on the situation. It is always good to see a thing through another pair of eyes. However, what I want to find this lady for, is to prevent a wrong thing being done—which she could set right, but I fear does not want to set right. So I must find her.’
‘Certainly in that case——’ said Emmy. She added, ‘I wonder if I could help you—if there was any place here where you think she might have gone!’
‘She may, perhaps,’ said Leo, with a laugh, ‘have doubled like a hare, and got safely into my mother’s room after all, while I have been hunting her here.’
‘Into—your——!’ Emmy was so bewildered that she could not keep in these astonished words, which were out of her mouth before she felt that here was some complicated matter with which she had no right to interfere. ‘Oh, never mind,’ she cried, ‘never mind! I did not mean to be so impertinent as to make any remark.’
‘Well,’ said Leo, ‘perhaps I did not mean to say so much: but I must tell you now, Miss Plowden——’
‘Oh, nothing, nothing, please,’ said Emmy in distress.
‘That my mother and I don’t look on the matter in the same light. She takes one view, I another. We need not enter into the question, but that is the fact. It is permitted to a man to differ with his mother in judgment when he is as old as I am.’
‘One cannot help it sometimes,’ said Emmy, in a low tone, with a slight bowing of her head. ‘It is very painful, but I suppose God never meant that we were not to exercise the faculties. He has given us. We may keep the commandment all the same. It says “honour.” It does not say always agree. The Bible is always so reasonable, don’t you think?’
‘Oh! I don’t know that I have very much considered that question, Miss Plowden.’
‘Never anything excessive that would be a burden,’ said Emmy, with the grave simplicity of assurance. ‘Perhaps if you could give me any indication, Mr. Swinford, I might think of a place to look for her, being on the spot, and knowing all the people.