But fully one-half of Mrs. Sudlow's indignation was due to the tone in which the letter was written. It was gall and wormwood to her to have to submit to reflections on the manner in which her daughter had been brought up. And then, too, the way in which all reference to herself was relegated to a postscript! Yet she dared not, by way of retort courteous, wing even the tiniest of envenomed shafts in return. For her children's sake she could not afford to quarrel with their rich, but odious, old aunt. It was very hard.
But what was Mrs. Sudlow's amazement and bitter indignation when Fanny remarked in her calmly aggravating way that she felt greatly obliged to her aunt, whose offer had come at a most opportune moment, seeing that she had been on the point of asking her parents to allow her to look out for some such situation as the one in question. She was quite aware, she went on to say, that her father's means were cramped, and it seemed to her that she was now of an age when she ought no longer to be a burden to him, but in a position to earn her own living. Her next sister, Winifred, was quite old enough to help her mother with the younger children and to take that position in the household which had heretofore been filled by her--Fanny. In short, this self-opinionated young person made it clearly manifest that she was possessed by a strong desire to work out an independent position for herself, pending a certain event which just now was only dimly discernible as something which pertained to a far-distant future.
As regards this little episode it is enough to add that, in the result, Fanny had her way, and a fortnight later was duly installed as companion to Miss Mawby.
In her encounter with her daughter Mrs. Sudlow had been beaten "all along the line," but even in her defeat she contrived to extract a grain of comfort from the fact that, as Miss Mawby rarely visited London, but spent nearly all her time at one or another watering-place, either in England or on the Continent, it would not be possible for Fanny and her lover to see much, if anything, of each other. That they would correspond was a foregone conclusion, but Mrs. Sudlow had seen something of the world, and had very limited faith in the axiom that "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Within her experience she had not infrequently found that absence has a precisely opposite effect, and that young men--and young maidens too, for that matter--lacking the presence of the object on whom their affections are supposed to be fixed, have a habit of gradually cooling down and of being drawn, as by a magnetic influence which they are unable to resist, to worship at some other shrine, and to conveniently forget, or ignore, the vows they have already whispered in the ear of another. Fanny had told her parents that, as regarded her engagement, no further steps should be taken by her till she was of age; therefore did Mrs. Sudlow derive some barren comfort from the thought that in two years many things might happen.
She found it far easier to forgive Philip Winslade than to forgive his mother; indeed, the latter was a piece of magnanimity which transcended the scope of her limited nature. After all, the young man had not been so much to blame. Fanny was an attractive girl, and it was small wonder that he had fallen in love with her. The head and front of his offending lay in the fact that he had been presumptuous enough to aspire to the hand of one in whose veins ran the blood of the ennobled Penmarthens.
[CHAPTER VII.]
PERSONAL TO PHIL.
Philip Winslade had been educated at the Iselford Grammar School, whence he had gone, with a scholarship, to Cambridge. As he did not conceive himself adapted for either the Church or the Bar, after taking his degree he had cast about for an opening in a tutorial capacity by way of making a start in life. This he had not been long in finding in the family of a certain Mr. Layland, a wealthy London merchant, who engaged him to take charge of the education of his two sons--backward boys who had been spoiled by their mother, lately dead. Under Phil's supervision the lads soon began to make marked progress, and Mr. Layland had every reason to congratulate himself on his choice.
It was when his engagement with the merchant was about two years old that, as a matter of curiosity and more in order to kill a few idle hours than with any ulterior purpose, he took up and began to study the details of a recent mysterious robbery of bonds and securities of which his employer had been the victim, and which had baffled all the efforts of policedom to bring the criminals to justice. As it was, Winslade presently found that the task he had taken in hand had an absorbing interest for him, as also that it brought into play a certain faculty of analysis of the possession of which he had been only half conscious before, as well as a gift for the sifting of contradictory evidence and the marshalling in orderly sequence of a complicated array of apparently disconnected details, thereby enabling him to build up a theory which indicated how and where the missing clue should be looked for. The result was that Winslade succeeded in doing that which Scotland Yard had failed to effect. As a consequence, his success got talked about in certain City circles, and, a little later, he was asked to take another case in hand which so far had proved to be as great a puzzle as the previous one. Here again Phil was successful in evolving a clue which in the result proved to be the right one.
Such was Mr. Layland's belief in his tutor's abilities that when Phil's engagement came to an end, in consequence of the departure of his pupils for a public school, the merchant requested him to go to the States and there carry out a certain diplomatic business commission which, for reasons of his own, he did not care to entrust to any recognised member of his staff. It was while on his voyage back to England that he encountered Miss Sudlow and her aunt, and thereby brought about a crisis in the affairs of Fanny and himself such as had entered into the dreams of neither.