"Handsome Judith?" she says, oddly lighting on Marianne's term for her bête noire. "Oh, I know!—I quite understand."
"But what do you understand? Come, Addie dear, don't be ... don't be female about it. Do say what!"
The impression or suggestion that she might have married which we fancy this story referred to when she first came into it seemed to mellow and mature in Miss Fossett as she replied, "Oh, Yorick, dear old boy! What an Arcadian shepherd you are!" And then she laughed, and repeated, "Handsome Judith!"
"But she showed me the letter—she showed me the letter!" cries the Rector, in a kind of frenzy with his friend for her persistence in being female, as he calls it. "Come, Addie, what could she do more?"
The above-named suggestion seems to mature until it all but insinuates that Adeline might marry still, if she chose. The thought just reaches the Rector's mind, and leaves it as she repeats, in answer to his question, "What more, indeed? But what did she say, I should like to know?"
"Ah!—that's the point. And we think we're going to be told, do we?" The Rector laughed a big good-humoured laugh. He detects in himself, and is puzzled by it, a new-born disposition to treat Addie as if she were in her teens, entirely caused by her excursion into feminine paths hard to explain or classify.
But she unexpectedly forms square to repulse patronage; harks back, as it were, to her thirties or forties—scarcely the latter yet—and says gravely, "No, dear old boy! I won't try to pry into any confidence. Don't tell me anything."
"I would as soon tell you as anyone"—he is looking at his watch—"a ... yes ... sooner than anyone—now Gus is gone." If the last four words had not been spoken, a hearer—Mrs. Eldridge, say—might have built an interest on what had preceded them. Those four made the speech fraternal.
Miss Fossett had come to Royd Rectory to pay a visit of consolation, following close on her brother's recent departure for Tunis. But it was also a visit to Lizarann. Her affection for the child was manifest from the fact that, when she arrived last night, before ever she ate a scrap of anything, after all that long journey, she went to look at her where she was asleep. It was nurse who made this mental note, and who remarked also, when Miss Fossett left the child's bedside, that she looked that upset you quite noticed it. Also that when the visitor said, "Is she always like that?" she seemed asking to enquire, like.