‘It proves,’ said the curate loftily, ‘how much more largely the most trivial incident in our own experience bulks in our eyes than the greatest event in another’s. I must say I am surprised that Miss Grey should be so obtuse—Miss Grey, of all people in the world.’
He was perhaps, to tell the truth, a little offended, too.
They went into the cottage, where Lady William was in the course of writing a letter, for which the Rector seemed to be waiting to give it his approval. Lady William was writing hurriedly, sometimes pausing to listen to something he said, but, I fear, not giving him the devoted attention which the Rector felt that he merited. Mr. Osborne was not a very common visitor at the cottage, and Lady William stopped her writing to give him a reception a little more ceremonious than usual.
‘Will you excuse me for a moment,’ she said, ‘while I finish a letter? It is an important one, which must be ready for this post, and my brother must see it before it goes.’
And then there ensued a curious pause. Mab did her best to entertain the visitors, discoursing to them on what she in her innocence still believed to be the principal event of the day—for Miss Grey’s revelation did not strike Mab as particularly exciting, and she had thought her mother’s interest in it quite out of proportion with the importance of the subject. And she felt the appearance of Florence and the curate together to be another proof of the momentous nature of the morning’s event; for what could have brought them here but a desire to settle about Mrs. Brown’s successor? So Mab began, thinking, no doubt, this was the chief matter in their thoughts, to talk of Mrs. Brown.
‘I was there yesterday,’ she said, ‘she might have given me a hint. I was there almost all the morning; the afternoon was a half-holiday. She might have said she was going away.’
‘My dear,’ cried Florry, a little impatient, ‘if she had intended to tell, there were other people whom she was more likely to tell than you.’
‘She told me a great many things,’ said Mab, ‘and I was interested in her. But, Mr. Osborne, there is a very nice girl, who was a pupil teacher, in one of the houses down by Riverside. She would do very well till you can get somebody, if you like to try her. I meant to have told Uncle James, but Uncle James is so full of that business of mother’s.’
‘Just as you are about the schoolmistress, Mab,’ said Florence, with a laugh.
Mr. Osborne did not make any remark, but he, too, thought—to fuss about Lady William’s business, whatever it might be, to make a commotion about the very ordinary and commonplace fact that Miss Grey had been present at a certain wedding twenty years ago—what a waste of emotion, what folly it was, when there was here, waiting for the telling, a piece of news so much more interesting! He exchanged a glance with Florence, and they both laughed at human absurdity and the blindness even of fathers and aunts, the latter especially, who are supposed to have an eye for events of the kind of which these two were so conscious. And then that everlasting affair about the schoolmistress! To be sure, somebody must be found and something done; but to thrust it upon them now!