'Indeed, my dear! What?'

'I have had a valentine.'

'Oh!' repressing a certain inclination to laugh at the bathos from the look of horror and shame in the girl's eyes.

'It is from that miserable Alexis! Oh, I know I brought it on myself, and I have been so wretched and so ashamed all day.'

'Was it so very shocking! Let me see--'

'Oh! I sent it back at once by the post, in an envelope, saying, "Sent by mistake."'

'But what was it like? Surely it was not one of the common shop things?'

'Oh no; there was rather a pretty outline of a nymph or muse, or something of that sort, at the top--drawn, I mean--and verses written below, something about my showing a lodestar of hope, but I barely glanced at it. I hated it too much.'

'I am sorry you were in such a hurry,' said Aunt Jane. 'No doubt it was a shock; but I am afraid you have given more pain than it quite deserved.'

'It was so impertinent!' cried Gillian, in astonished, shame-stricken indignation.

'So it seems to you,' said her aunt, 'and it was very bad taste; but you should remember that this poor lad has grown up in a stratum of society where he may have come to regard this as a suitable opportunity of evincing his grat.i.tude, and perhaps it may be very hard upon him to have this work of his treated as an insult.'

'But you would not have had me keep it and tolerate it?' exclaimed Gillian.

'I can hardly tell without having seen it; but you might have done the thing more civilly, through his sister, or have let me give it back to him. However, it is too late now; I will make a point of seeing Kalliope to-morrow, but in the meantime you really need not be so horribly disgusted and ashamed.'

'I thought he was quite a different sort!'

'Perhaps, after all, your thoughts were not wrong; and he only fancied, poor boy, that he had found a pretty way of thanking you.'

This did not greatly comfort Gillian, who might prefer feeling that she was insulted rather than that she had been cruelly unkind, and might like to blame Alexis rather than herself. And, indeed, in any case, she had sense enough to perceive that this very unacceptable compliment was the consequence of her own act of independence of more experienced heads.

The next person Miss Mohun met was Fergus, lugging upstairs, step by step, a monstrous lump of stone, into which he required her to look and behold a fascinating crevice full of glittering spar.

'Where did you get that, Fergus?'

'Up off the cliff over the quarry.'

'Are you sure that you may have it?'

'Oh yes; White said I might. It's so jolly, auntie! Frank Stebbing is gone away to the other shop in the Apennines, where the old boss lives.

What splendiferous specimens he must have the run of! Our Stebbing says 'tis because Kally White makes eyes at him; but any way, White has got to do his work while he's away, and go all the rounds to see that things are right, so I go after him, and he lets me have just what I like--such jolly crystals.'

'I am sure I hope it is all right.'

'Oh yes, I always ask him, as you told me; but he is awfully slow and mopy and down in the mouth to-day. Stebbing says he is sweet upon Gill; but I told him that couldn't be, White knew better. A general's daughter, indeed! and Will remembers his father a sergeant.'

'It is very foolish, Fergus. Say no more about it, for it is not nice talk about your sister.'

'I'll lick any one who does,' said Fergus, b.u.mping his stone up another step.

Poor Aunt Jane! There was more to fall on her as soon as the door was finally shut on the two rooms communicating with one another, which the sisters called their own. Mrs. Mount's manipulations of Miss Adeline's rich brown hair were endured with some impatience, while Miss Mohun leant back in her chair in her shawl-patterned dressing-gown, watching, with a sort of curious wonder and foreboding, the restlessness that proved that something was in store, and meantime somewhat lazily brushing out her own thinner darker locks.

'You are tired, Miss Jane,' said the old servant, using the pet name in private moments. 'You had better let me do your hair.'

'No, thank you, f.a.n.n.y; I have very nearly done,' she said, marking the signs of eagerness on her sister's part. 'Oh, by the bye, did that hot bottle go down to Lilian Giles?'

'Yes, ma'am; Mrs. Giles came up for it.'

'Did she say whether Lily was well enough to see Miss Gillian?'

Mrs. Mount coughed a peculiar cough that her mistresses well knew to signify that she could tell them something they would not like to hear, if they chose to ask her, and it was the younger who put the question--

'f.a.n.n.y, did she say anything?'

'Well, Miss Ada, I told her she must be mistaken, but she stuck to it, though she said she never would have breathed a word if Miss Gillian had not come back again, but she thought you should know it.'

'Know what?' demanded Jane.

'Well, Miss Jane, she should say 'tis the talk that Miss Gillian, when you have thought her reading to the poor girl, has been running down to the works--and 'tis only the ignorance of them that will talk, but they say it is to meet a young man. She says, Mrs. Giles do, that she never would have noticed such talk, but that the young lady did always seem in a hurry, only just reading a chapter, and never stopping to talk to poor Lily after it; and she has seen her herself going down towards the works, instead of towards home, ma'am. And she said she could not bear that reading to her girl should be made a colour for such doings.'

'Certainly not, if it were as she supposes,' said Miss Mohun, sitting very upright, and beating her own head vigorously with a very p.r.i.c.kly brush; 'but you may tell her, f.a.n.n.y, that I know all about it, and that her friend is Miss White, who you remember spent an evening here.'

f.a.n.n.y's good-humoured face cleared up. 'Yes, ma'am, I told her that I was quite sure that Miss Gillian would not go for to do anything wrong, and that it could be easy explained; but people has tongues, you see.'

'You were quite right to tell us, f.a.n.n.y. Good-night.'

'People has tongues!' repeated Adeline, when that excellent person had disappeared. 'Yes, indeed, they have. But, Jenny, do you really mean to say that you know all about this?'

'Yes, I believe so.'

'Oh, I wish you had been at home to-day when Victoria came in. It really is a serious business.'

'Victoria! What has she to do with it? I should have thought her Marchioness-ship quite out of the region of gossip, though, for that matter, grandees like it quite as much as other people.'

'Don't, Jane, you know it does concern her through companionship for Phyllis, and she was very kind.'

'Oh yes, I can see her sailing in, magnificently kind from her elevation. But how in the world did she manage to pick up all this in the time?' said poor Jane, tired and pestered into the sharpness of her early youth.

'Dear Jenny, I wish I had said nothing to-night. Do wait till you are rested.'

'I am not in the least tired, and if I were, do you think I could sleep with this half told?'

'You said you knew.'

'Then it is only about Gillian being so silly as to go down to Miss White's office at the works to look over the boy's Greek exercises.'

'You don't mean that you allowed it!'

'No, Gillian's impulsiveness, just like her mother's, began it, as a little a.s.sertion of modern independence; but while she was away that little step from brook to river brought her to the sense that she had been a goose, and had used me rather unfairly, and so she came and confessed it all to me on the way home from the station the first morning after her return. She says she had written it all to her mother from the first.'