“Certainly. It’s impudent, too, and I don’t wonder you were moved,” murmured Harrington, slowly, with an absorbed air.
“Moved!” snapped Wentworth. “By Jupiter, I am moved to give him a sound horse-whipping, and he’ll get it, or my name’s not what it is. Why, look at it, Harrington. In the first place, Emily’s a particular friend of his. Now, wouldn’t you think that the commonest respect for her would have prevented him from bandying her name about in conversation with anybody, much less old Bagasse?”
“Eureka! I have it,” exclaimed Harrington, bursting from his abstraction. “That accounts for Bagasse’s remark about the two ladies that gave the violets.”
“What do you mean?” inquired Wentworth.
Harrington recounted what the fencing-master had said that morning.
“You see, Richard,” he added, “that set me wondering; for how did Bagasse know that ladies had given us the violets? How did he know but that I had gathered them from my own yard? Then, when I saw your nosegay in his button-hole, I thought you must have told him, and I was astonished to think that you should choose the old veteran for a confidant.”
“By Jupiter, Harrington, you didn’t think I would do such a thing,” exclaimed Wentworth, reproachfully.
“My dear Wentworth, it was absurd in me, and I beg your pardon,” returned Harrington. “Certainly, it was not like you; but then, somebody must have told him, and how could I imagine it was Witherlee?”
Wentworth sat silent, thinking with mounting rage of Witherlee’s remarks to the fencing-master. If he had been cool and thoughtful, he might have at least suspected, from the sample he had of the good Fernando’s nature, that he was at the bottom of Emily’s alienation from himself. But Wentworth’s vivid temper only threw gleams and flashes on things, and what he saw, he saw in salient points, without observing their connections and relations.