‘We young ones: does that mean Elly,’ said Mr. Cattley, ‘and me?’
‘You are as great innocents the one as the other,’ said Mrs. Egerton.
She was seated by the side of the fire, with a little screen before her which shielded her face, an ample figure in a black satin dress which gave back a faint glimmer of reflection. The teatable beside her, half in light and half in shadow, gave brighter dancing gleams, and the curate, stooping forward with a certain tender eagerness, saw a gigantic uncouth shadow of himself moving with the movements of the light upon the further wall. Behind Mrs. Egerton was the great window, full of the fading twilight, fading quickly into night, against which came the shadow silhouette of Elly with her big book clasped in her arms.
‘But this is abandoning our subject,’ said Mrs. Egerton. ‘The best thing is for me to call.’
‘Far the best—you will make it all clear if anyone can.’
‘I have not so much confidence in myself as all that, but still I can try. It is curious to find a sort of mystery about people one seemed to know so well—or rather to find out how very little we did know after all. And whose son is John? It never seemed necessary to inquire. But this—lady: well, I will call her so if you like it—seems to confuse everything. There may be other daughters—or sons—half-a-dozen, for anything we know.’
She spoke in the aggrieved tone natural to a lady in the country, a semi-clerical lady, entitled through her brother to know everybody, and finding that here was somebody whom she did not know.
‘John—must be the son of a son—for otherwise how could he be Sandford?’
‘John has got a mother,’ said Elly, nodding from the window. ‘He has not seen her for ten years.’
‘Can this, then, be John’s mother?’ cried Mrs. Egerton.