'I don't know—I believe she's very respectable,' said young Townsend. And then he looked across to his cousin and began to laugh. 'Look here, we are talking about you,' he added.
Morris Townsend paused in his conversation with Mrs. Penniman, and stared, with a little smile. Then he got up, as if he were going.
'As far as you are concerned, I can't return the compliment,' he said to Catherine's companion. 'But as regards Miss Sloper, it's another affair.'
Catherine thought this little speech wonderfully well turned; but she was embarrassed by it, and she also got up. Morris Townsend stood looking at her and smiling; he put out his hand for farewell. He was going, without having said anything to her; but even on these terms she was glad to have seen him.
'I will tell her what you have said—when you go!' said Mrs.
Penniman, with an insinuating laugh.
Catherine blushed, for she felt almost as if they were making sport of her. What in the world could this beautiful young man have said? He looked at her still, in spite of her blush; but very kindly and respectfully.
'I have had no talk with you,' he said, 'and that was what I came for. But it will be a good reason for coming another time; a little pretext—if I am obliged to give one. I am not afraid of what your aunt will say when I go.'
With this the two young men took their departure; after which Catherine, with her blush still lingering, directed a serious and interrogative eye to Mrs. Penniman. She was incapable of elaborate artifice, and she resorted to no jocular device—to no affectation of the belief that she had been maligned—to learn what she desired.
'What did you say you would tell me?' she asked.
Mrs. Penniman came up to her, smiling and nodding a little, looked at her all over, and gave a twist to the knot of ribbon in her neck. 'It's a great secret, my dear child; but he is coming a-courting!'
Catherine was serious still. 'Is that what he told you!'
'He didn't say so exactly. But he left me to guess it. I'm a good guesser.'
'Do you mean a-courting me?'
'Not me, certainly, miss; though I must say he is a hundred times more polite to a person who has no longer extreme youth to recommend her than most of the young men. He is thinking of some one else.' And Mrs. Penniman gave her niece a delicate little kiss. 'You must be very gracious to him.'
Catherine stared—she was bewildered. 'I don't understand you,' she said; 'he doesn't know me.'
'Oh yes, he does; more than you think. I have told him all about you.'
'Oh, Aunt Penniman!' murmured Catherine, as if this had been a breach of trust. 'He is a perfect stranger—we don't know him.' There was infinite, modesty in the poor girl's 'we.'
Aunt Penniman, however, took no account of it; she spoke even with a touch of acrimony. 'My dear Catherine, you know very well that you admire him!'
'Oh, Aunt Penniman!' Catherine could only murmur again. It might very well be that she admired him—though this did not seem to her a thing to talk about. But that this brilliant stranger—this sudden apparition, who had barely heard the sound of her voice—took that sort of interest in her that was expressed by the romantic phrase of which Mrs. Penniman had just made use: this could only be a figment of the restless brain of Aunt Lavinia, whom every one knew to be a woman of powerful imagination.
CHAPTER VI
Mrs. Penniman even took for granted at times that other people had as much imagination as herself; so that when, half an hour later, her brother came in, she addressed him quite on this principle.
'He has just been here, Austin; it's such a pity you missed him.'
'Whom in the world have I missed?' asked the Doctor.
'Mr. Morris Townsend; he has made us such a delightful visit.'
'And who in the world is Mr. Morris Townsend?'
'Aunt Penniman means the gentleman—the gentleman whose name I couldn't remember,' said Catherine.
'The gentleman at Elizabeth's party who was so struck with
Catherine,' Mrs. Penniman added.
'Oh, his name is Morris Townsend, is it? And did he come here to propose to you?'
'Oh, father,' murmured the girl for all answer, turning away to the window, where the dusk had deepened to darkness.
'I hope he won't do that without your permission,' said Mrs.
Penniman, very graciously.
'After all, my dear, he seems to have yours,' her brother answered.
Lavinia simpered, as if this might not be quite enough, and Catherine, with her forehead touching the window- panes, listened to this exchange of epigrams as reservedly as if they had not each been a pin-prick in her own destiny.
'The next time he comes,' the Doctor added, 'you had better call me.
He might like to see me.'
Morris Townsend came again, some five days afterwards; but Dr. Sloper was not called, as he was absent from home at the time. Catherine was with her aunt when the young man's name was brought in, and Mrs. Penniman, effacing herself and protesting, made a great point of her niece's going into the drawing-room alone.
'This time it's for you—for you only,' she said. 'Before, when he talked to me, it was only preliminary—it was to gain my confidence. Literally, my dear, I should not have the COURAGE to show myself to- day.'
And this was perfectly true. Mrs. Penniman was not a brave woman, and Morris Townsend had struck her as a young man of great force of character, and of remarkable powers of satire; a keen, resolute, brilliant nature, with which one must exercise a great deal of tact. She said to herself that he was 'imperious,' and she liked the word and the idea. She was not the least jealous of her niece, and she had been perfectly happy with Mr. Penniman, but in the bottom of her heart she permitted herself the observation: 'That's the sort of husband I should have had!' He
