“Can’t say I have exactly,” said the colonel placidly, but his eyes narrowed again. “Who is the lady?”
“I thought—I am sure Melville must have written you. But— Oh, yes, he wrote yesterday to Boston. Well, Bertie, Miss Smith is a Southerner; she says she is a South Carolinian, but Aunt Rebecca picked her up in Washington, where she was with a kind of cousin of ours who was half crazy. Miss Smith took care of her and she died”—she fixed a darkling eye on the soldier—“she died and she left Miss Smith money.”
“Much?”
“A few thousands. That is how Aunt Rebecca met her, and she pulled the wool over auntie’s eyes, and they came back together. She’s awfully clever.”
“Young? Pretty?”
“Oh, dear, no. And she’s nearer forty than thirty. Just the designing age for a woman when she’s still wanting to marry some one but beginning to be afraid that she can’t. Then such creatures always try to get money. If they can’t marry it, and there’s no man to set their caps for, they try to wheedle it out of some poor fool woman!” Millicent was in earnest, there was no doubt of that; the sure sign was her unconscious return to the direct expressions of her early life in the Middle West.
“And you think Miss Smith is trying to influence Aunt Rebecca?”
“Of course she is; and Aunt Rebecca is eighty, Rupert. And often while people of her age show no other sign of weakening intellect, they are not well regulated in their affections; they take fancies to people and get doting and clinging. She is getting to depend on Miss Smith. Really, that woman has more influence with her than all the rest of us together. She won’t hear a word against her. Why! when I tried to suggest how little we knew about Miss Smith and that it would be better not to trust her too entirely, she positively resented it. Of course I used tact, too. I was so hurt, so surprised!” Mrs. Millicent was plainly aggrieved.
The colonel, who had his own opinion of the tact of his brother’s wife, was not so surprised; but he made an inarticulate sound which might pass for sympathy.
“We’ve been worried a good deal,” pursued Mrs. Melville, “about the way Aunt Rebecca has acted. She wouldn’t stay in Fairport, where we could have some influence over her. She was always going south or going to the sea-shore or going somewhere. Sometimes I suspect Miss Smith made her, to keep her away from us, you know.”