"Without any idea of even seeing you, I glanced in the direction of the entrance. You were just parting with some one whom I took to be Aylmer. That is all. Let us say no more about it."
Geraldine bent to kiss Kathleen, who had dropped down on the rug beside her, and then rising from her seat said—
"Make haste, Kitty. There goes the luncheon bell."
Kathleen clung round her cousin's neck, and kissed her repeatedly.
"I will tell you and aunty all about my walk afterwards," she replied, and then hurried to her own room to make herself presentable.
When the ladies gathered at the table, Mrs. Ellicott and Geraldine were, probably, the only persons under the roof of Hollingsby Hall who did not know that its mistress had been seen walking out with Captain Torrance, "just for all the world as if they were keeping company," said one of the under-gardeners to Patty Mountain, in the simple words which would have been used of one of her own degree seen under similar circumstances.
"Ha! Keeping company with my young mistress!" replied Patty, angry at the very mention of such a possibility. "As if Miss Mountford would demean herself by looking the side he's on—in that way. You had better hold your tongue altogether than talk nonsense like that."
"Nonsense or no, Patty, our young mistress did go a long walk with the captain this very morning, and whether you believe my tongue, or think I'm telling you what isn't true, won't alter what is. I've got my eyesight, and I saw that groom of the captain's give our young lady a letter, as I was coming back from the smithy, where I'd been getting a tool mended. A little while since, after dinner-hour, I saw the captain and her walking this way together, as smart as you please, laughing and talking, and he brought her as far as the gate."
Such evidence was overpowering; but Patty, staunch to her mistress's cause, was not going to allow that any importance was to be attached to it.
"You might know," she said, "that Captain Jack, as folks call him, just because he belongs to the county, as one may say, though by all accounts he's no real captain now, seeing he had to leave the army years ago, has impudence enough for anything. He would push himself into our mistress's company without saying, 'By your leave, miss,' and he would stick by her side like a leech, just to show off. What could she do?"