“No one ought to have given such a promise,” he said, coldly, with averted eyes.
“You are always right, I ought not to have done so; but she was dying, and I was fond of her, poor girl, though she was foolish—it is not always the wisest people one loves most—fond of her, very fond of her, and of her poor little child.”
The tears came to Miss Lance’s eyes. She shook her head a little as if to shake them from her eyelashes. “Why should I cry? They have been so long happy, happier far than we——”
Mrs. Leigh, the prosecutor, the accuser, gave a gulp, a sob; the child was her grandchild, her only one—and besides anger in a woman is as prone to tears as sorrow. She gave a stifled cry, “I don’t deny you were good to the child; oh, Laura, I could have forgiven you everything! But not—not——”
“What?” Miss Lance said.
Mrs. Leigh seized upon Bee by the arm and drew her forward—Aubrey’s mother wanted words, she wanted eloquence, her arguments had to be pointed by fact. She took Bee, who had been standing in proud yet excited spectatorship, and held her by her own side. “Aubrey,” she said, almost inarticulately, and stopped to recover her breath—“Aubrey—whom you had driven from his home—found at last this dear girl, this nice, good girl, who would have made him a new life. But you interfered, you wrote to her father, you went—I don’t know what you did—and said you had a claim, a prior claim. If you appeal to Colonel Kingsward, he is the best judge. You went to him——”
“Not to me, I was not aware, I never even saw Miss Lance till long after; forgive me for interrupting you.”
Miss Lance turned towards him again with that full look of faith and confidence. “Always just!” she said. And this time for a tremulous moment their eyes met. He turned his away again hastily, but he had received that touch; an indefinable wavering came over his aspect of iron.
“Yes,” she said, “I do not deny it—it is quite true. Shall I now explain before every one who is here? I think,” she added, after a moment, “that my little Betty, who has nothing particular to do with it, may run away.”
“I!” said Betty, clinging to the back of a chair.