“It seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, in their first review of the affair, after Boyne had done a brother’s duty in trying to bring Ellen under their mother’s censure, “that he was the gentleman who discussed the theatre with Boyne at the vaudeville last winter. Boyne just casually mentioned it. I was so provoked!”
“I don’t see what bearing the fact has,” the judge remarked.
“Why, Boyne liked him very much that night, but now he seems to feel very much as Lottie does about him. He thinks he laughs too much.”
“I don’t know that there’s much harm in that,” said the judge. “And I shouldn’t value Boyne’s opinion of character very highly.”
“I value any one’s intuitions—especially children’s.”
“Boyne’s in that middle state where he isn’t quite a child. And so is Lottie, for that matter.”
“That is true,” their mother assented. “And we ought to be glad of anything that takes Ellen’s mind off herself. If I could only believe she was forgetting that wretch!”
“Does she ever speak of him?”
“She never hints of him, even. But her mind may be full of him all the time.”
The judge laughed impatiently. “It strikes me that this young Mr. Breckon hasn’t much advantage of Ellen in what Lottie calls closeness!”