"I suppose that's what you grunted at, the first time?"
"Suppose what's what I grunted at ... oh! 'had the good fortune to sustain no injury,' do you mean? Well, Grandmamma, I suppose you wouldn't expect me to cry my eyes out if...."
"If 'handsome Judith' got her beauty spoiled—is that it?"
"I shouldn't cry my eyes out. I wonder who her other gentleman was, in the car! I'm glad it wasn't Titus, at any rate."
"How do you know?"
"Oh, mamma, how can you be such a fool, when Bob heard from his father only yesterday, at that place in Derbyshire; he got the letter this morning." Bob had been at Broadstairs a week at this date, and, in pursuance of a policy of avoiding his grandmother on Sundays, when she was liable to malignant forms of piety, had started early in the day to walk to Canterbury—his beloved Tillotson was staying there with an ecclesiastical relative—where he would stop the night, and whence he would walk back next day, accompanied probably by Tillotson. Well!—it was only eighteen miles!
Marianne was as sure that her husband was safe, leagues away from Royd Hall, yesterday morning, as she was that she had packed off Bob with sandwiches and cake after an early breakfast twelve hours ago, and that he and Tillotson were enjoying Choral Services and Purple Emperors alternately to their hearts' content. She was satisfied—not reasonably; but then, it was comfortable to be unreasonable—that he had posted the letter as soon as it was written; and as it reached on Sunday, it was posted on Saturday. What could be clearer?
She was so comfortable about it that she re-read the paragraph once or twice, not quite without a kindling hope that Miss Arkroyd's motoring about with a gentleman unnamed might "mean something"—mean something, that is, that would end the chapter of Titus's admiration for, or "connection with," Miss Arkroyd. It didn't matter which you called it.
One thing was clear enough. The injured man was a stranger to the purveyor of the news; not the owner of the car, just mentioned, nor any other of the habitués of Royd Hall, all of whom would be well known in the neighbourhood. Oh yes!—that was all right. She hoped, however, that if he was an aspirant to Miss Arkroyd's hand, he was not seriously damaged, so as to diminish his probabilities of success. As for "Blind Jim," she was sorry for him, with a general feeling that "handsome Judith" was responsible for his mishap, but without any definite recollection of him. She may never have heard him mentioned at all, for Mrs. Steptoe was not communicative about her brother; and although Challis had certainly made Lizarann's acquaintance before Marianne left her home, it was only on that last day of his abruptly terminated visit to Royd. And that was all ancient history by now.
She resumed the reconstruction question quite at ease in her mind; if anything, with a sense of something not unpleasant having happened. Further search yielded two or three more wafers, and the ship was completed and launched. But the resistance, to shearing-force, of the bolts that held the fore and aft parts together had not been properly calculated. A dissension between the owners led to an attempt to drag her two ways at once, and—to use very un-nautical language—she gave at the wafers. Mumps, seized with despair, was told that if she roared and stamped, she shouldn't be allowed to make ships at all; and her mother, to show that she was in earnest, picked up the shattered vessel, and proceeded to re-embody it as the Sunday paper. But a something caught her eye, and she read again.