“It would make mother feel uneasy and timid in Mrs. Cheyne’s presence,” she observed. “She never likes that sort of hysterical attacks. We could not make her understand. Poor thing! I hope she is asleep by this time. Shall you go to-morrow, Phil, and ask after her?”
Phillis made a wry face at this, and owned she had had enough adventures to last her for a long time. But she admitted, too, that she would be anxious to know how Mrs. Cheyne would be.
“Yes, I suppose I must go and just ask after her,” she said, as she rose rather wearily and lighted her candle. “There is not the least chance of my seeing her. Good-night, Nannie! Don’t let all this keep you awake; but I do not expect to sleep a wink myself.”
Which dismal prophecy was not fulfilled, as Phillis dropped into a heavy slumber the moment her head touched the pillow.
But her dreams were hardly pleasant. She thought she was walking down the “ghost’s walk,” between the yews and cypresses, with Mr. Dancy, and that in the darkest part he threw off his cloak and felt hat, and showed the grinning skull of a skeleton, while a bony arm tried to seize her. She woke moaning with fright, to find Dulce’s long hair streaming over her face, and the birds singing in the sweet breezy dawn; after which she fell into a dreamless, refreshing sleep.
Phillis had to submit to rather a severe reproof from her mother, in return for her frankness. Mrs. Challoner’s prudery was up in arms the moment she heard of Mrs. Williams’s lodger.
“Mrs. Williams ought to have come with you herself; but a strange man at that time of night!—what would Mr. Drummond have said to you?”
“Whatever Mr. Drummond liked to say!” returned Phillis, pettishly, for this was stroking her already ruffled feelings decidedly the wrong way.
Phillis always turned captious whenever Mr. Drummond was mentioned; but she subsided into meekness again when her 213 mother fell to crying and bemoaning her hard fate and her darlings’ unprotected position.
“Oh, what would your dear father have said?” she cried, in such utter misery of tone that Phillis began kissing her, and promising that she would never, never be out so late again, and that on no account would she walk up the Braidwood Road in the evening with a strange man who wore an outlandish cloak and a felt hat that only wanted a feather to remind her of Guy Fawkes, only Guy Fawkes did not wear blue spectacles.