“She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming home from a walk, and wanted to talk with me about Miss Shirley.”
“I suppose Miss Shirley was the day’s heroine after what had happened?”
“The half-day’s, or quarter-day’s heroine, perhaps. She left on the church train for town yesterday morning soon after I saw her. Miss Andrews seemed to think I was an authority on the subject, and she approached me with a large-eyed awe that was very amusing, though it was affecting, too. I suppose that girls must have many worships for other girls before they have any worship for a man. This girl couldn’t separate Miss Shirley, on the lookout for another engagement, from the psychical part she had played. She raved about her; she thought she was beautiful, and she wanted to know all about her and how she could help her. Miss Andrews’s parents are rich but respectable, I understand, and she’s an only child. I came in for a share of her awe; she had found out that I was not only not Verrian the actor, but an author of the same name, and she had read my story with passionate interest, but apparently in that unliterary way of many people without noticing who wrote it; she seemed to have thought it was Harding Davis or Henry James; she wasn’t clear which. But it was a good deal to have had her read it at all in that house; I don’t believe anybody else had, except Miss Shirley and Miss Macroyd.”
Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily have interested her supremely to an immediate curiosity. “And how came she to think you would know so much about Miss Shirley?”
Verrian frowned. “I think from Miss Macroyd. Miss Macroyd seems to have taken a grandmotherly concern in my affairs through the whole week. Perhaps she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station the day we came, and meant to take it out of Miss Shirley and myself. She had seen us together in the woods, one day, and she must have told it about. Mrs. Westangle wouldn’t have spoken of us together, because she never speaks of anything unless it is going to count; and there was no one else who knew of our acquaintance.”
“Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods with the girl, any one might have seen you.”
“I didn’t. It was quite by accident that we met there. Miss Shirley was anxious to keep her presence in the house a secret from everybody.”
Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way, with this. She would not deal indirectly, with it, or in any wise covertly or surreptitiously. “It seems to me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness for secrecy,” she said.
“I think she has,” Verrian admitted. “Though, in this case, it was essential to the success of her final scheme. But she is a curious study. I suppose that timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be timid in everything.”