“A whim of yours!!!” repeated Zack, with a look which made Mrs. Peckover’s cheeks redden with rising indignation. “What! a woman at your time of life subject to whims! My darling Peckover, it won’t do! My mind’s made up to give her the Hair Bracelet. Nothing in the world can stop me—except, of course, Madonna’s having a Hair Bracelet already, which I know she hasn’t.”
“Oh! you know that, do you, you mischievous Imp? Then, for once in a way, you just know wrong!” exclaimed Mrs. Peckover, losing her temper altogether.
“You don’t mean to say so? How very remarkable, to think of her having a Hair Bracelet already, and of my not knowing it!—Mrs. Peckover,” continued Zack, mimicking the tone and manner of his old clerical enemy, the Reverend Aaron Yollop, “what I am now about to say grieves me deeply; but I have a solemn duty to discharge, and in the conscientious performance of that duty, I now unhesitatingly express my conviction that the remark you have just made is—a flam.”
“It isn’t—Monkey!” returned Mrs. Peckover, her anger fairly boiling over, as she nodded her head vehemently in Zack’s face.
Just then, Valentine’s step became audible in the room above; first moving towards the door, then suddenly retreating from it, as if he had been called back.
“I hav’n’t let out what I oughtn’t, have I?” thought Mrs. Peckover; calming down directly, when she heard the movement upstairs.
“Oh, you stick to it, do you?” continued Zack. “It’s rather odd, old lady, that Mrs. Blyth should have said nothing about this newly-discovered Hair Bracelet of yours while I was talking to her. But she doesn’t know, of course: and Valentine doesn’t know either, I suppose? By Jove! he’s not gone to bed yet: I’ll run back, and ask him if Madonna really has got a Hair Bracelet!”
“For God’s sake don’t!—don’t say a word about it, or you’ll get me into dreadful trouble!” exclaimed Mrs. Peckover, turning pale as she thought of possible consequences, and catching young Thorpe by the arm when he tried to pass her in the passage.
The step up stairs crossed the room again.
“Well, upon my life,” cried Zack, “of all the extraordinary old women