She was kneeling up now, and had seized Lettice's hands. "You're making me spill the milk, and I can't get any more," Lettice warned her; but she was not to be diverted. "You've been worried for ages, only I've been such a blind donkey thinking of Denis I haven't noticed," she cried. "Why did he say you oughtn't to be let sit alone and think? What did he mean? Lettice—oh, Lettice! is it about Mr. Gardiner? Have you any bad news? Oh, don't, don't tell me I've done that too!"
Lettice freed herself summarily. Dorothea had room in her little head for but one idea at a time, and therefore was apt to overlook what lay under her little nose; but, her attention once aroused, she was keen on a scent, and her intuition, the prerogative of semi-civilized minds, had a way of landing her dead on the truth. Now there were certain things which Denis might be permitted to see, but which Dorothea might not—no! not on any account.
"There isn't any news at all, if you want to know," she said. "He hit a warder, so all his letters and things have been stopped off."
"But isn't Denis going to visit him quite soon?"
"That's stopped too."
"Oh!" said Dorothea blankly, "oh dear! I see."
She did see, only too plainly. Oh, what a little donkey she had been! But who would ever have imagined that Lettice—and with Mr. Gardiner, of all people! oh, how could she? She did, though, no doubt about that, and with Lettice that would mean a dreadfully big thing, the whole of her life, and—oh, good gracious! how she would simply hate to have any one know! Oh, she mustn't, she mustn't be allowed to guess! All this passed through Dorothea's mind in the space of half-a-second, and under the stimulus of that last thought she pulled herself round, with a mighty effort, to ask as innocently as she could: "Did—did Denis know about this the day of the show?"
"He'd just heard."
"Oh," said Dorothea, "oh, I wonder he didn't strike me to the ground! Oh, how wicked, how wicked I've been!"
There was nothing visible but the red handkerchief. Lettice looked at her sharply; but the pose was so natural, and any pose seemed so foreign to Dorothea, and Lettice so much wanted to be taken in, that she was. Not wholly; but she stuck her head in the sand and refused to see her own doubts. And behind the red handkerchief Dorothea, too much overwhelmed to cry, sat among the ruins which she had pulled down on her own head and wondered helplessly when she would see the end of all the harm she had done. "I was so happy about Denis, and now there's this!" Her love for Denis had been a sort of sublimated selfishness, but now she was thinking about other people—about Lettice, yes, and about Gardiner, though there she was all at sea. "I don't know what I've done to him, but it must be something very bad for Lettice to be like this!" she reflected. "But, oh dear! after all, what should I feel like if it were Denis in prison? And what would he feel like himself? And Mr. Gardiner's led such a free sort of out-of-doors life—"