“I know your name,” she said slowly. “But——”
“I came from London the day before yesterday. I am staying at the White Lion, and I am late of the 14th Dragoons.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, indeed,” she said. “Is that so? Well,” rubbing a little of the powder from her nose with a needlecase, and looking at him very shrewdly, “I think,” she continued, “that that is the answer to your question.”
Vaughan stared.
“I do not understand you,” he said.
“Then I must speak more plainly. Were you an usher at Mr. Bengough’s your civility—civility, I think you called it?—to my assistant had passed very well, Mr. Vaughan. But the civility of a gentleman, late of the 14th Dragoons, fresh from London, and staying at the White Lion, to a young person in Miss Smith’s position is apt, as in this case—eh?—to lead to misconstruction.”
“You do me an injustice!” he said, reddening to the roots of his hair.
“Possibly, possibly,” Miss Sibson said. But on that, without warning, she gave way to a fit of silent laughter, which caused her portly form to shake like a jelly. It was a habit with her, attributed by some to her private view of Mrs. Chapone’s famous letters on the improvement of the mind; by others, to that knowledge of the tricks and turns of her sex with which thirty years of schoolkeeping had endowed her.
No doubt the face of rueful resentment with which Arthur Vaughan regarded her did not shorten the fit. But at last, “Young gentleman,” she said, “you do not deceive me! You did not come here to-day merely to hear an old woman make an apology.”
He tried to maintain an attitude of dignified surprise. But her jolly laugh, her shrewd red face were too much for him. His eyes fell. “Upon my honour,” he said, “I meant nothing.”