"We shall have to make up our minds, Bess," said Athelstan Taylor two or three days later to his sister-in-law, at Royd.
"To...?" said Miss Caldecott, in brief interrogation.
"We shall have to make up our minds what to say to Jim Coupland. You see what Addie thinks?"
Aunt Bessy saw, she said. But after reflection hit upon an escape from painful inferences. Didn't Addie sometimes look on the worst side of things? "Perhaps she does," said the Rector, and felt more cheerful over it. Then he got sundry letters from his pocket, and re-read them. His little access of cheerfulness seemed chilled by the reading, for when he had ended he shook his head, in his own confidence, and sighed as he refolded the letters.
"Let me look at them again," said Miss Caldecott. Both knew the contents of these letters perfectly, and each knew the other knew them. But it looked like weighing them in a more accurate pair of scales than the last, every time of reading.
"Make anything of them?" the Rector asked, but got no answer. The letters were being read slowly. Justice was being done to the question.
But the truth was Aunty Bessy was suppressing her inspirations because she couldn't trust her voice with them. She was a dry and correct lady, but affectionate for all that; and it was her affection for Lizarann that had got in her throat, and would have to subside before she could screw herself up to pooh-poohing the letter Miss Jane the Chinese had written to Adeline Fossett, with such a bad account of her patient. This was the letter we left Lizarann listening to, as she lay looking forward to the sea, next day.
Presently the answer came, following on a short cough or two connected with the throat-symptom:—"I do think people of that sort are often very inconsiderate. Don't you?"
"Which sort?"