The expectation of an immense period of waiting implied by this suggestion ought to have decided the matron addressed to take the plunge; but it did not.
“I do not think that I should ever have had the courage to tell you—to enter upon so painful a subject at all—if Catherine——” She broke off with a drowning-man look at her daughter.
Mrs. Tancred looked also at that daughter. She had never liked Catherine as much as she did Catherine’s mother, nor had ever hidden from herself that it was because of her supposed high appreciation by Edward, and because the neighbourhood’s habitual observation, “What a nice and suitable wife she would have made for him!” had penetrated, if not to her bodily ears, yet to the ears of her heart. For these very reasons, driven by her unsquarable conscience, she had always treated the girl with an unusual leniency.
“Perhaps Catherine will explain,” she said, with a strained patience, but not harshly.
Miss Alymer was already highly pink; she waxed pinker.
“I think it would come better from mother.”
Mrs. Tancred made a movement, instantly checked, of extreme irritation at being thus shuttle-cocked between two foolish battledores to the waste of time and temper.
“I will get my knitting until you have decided which of you is likely to regain your powers of speech first,” she said, moving towards her large work-basket, and drawing it within reach of her chair.
The determined endurance expressed by her knitting-needles—for she was nearing the end of her patience, and was never much of a hand at feigning—at length goaded the jibbing pair into more explicit utterance.
“We came to speak to you about the girl that Edward brought to see us yesterday.”