“Lucy, my dear,” said Miss Wodehouse, whose gentle forehead was puckered with care, “I want to speak to you. I have not been able to get you out of my mind since ever we met Mr. Wentworth at the green door.”
“Was there any need for getting me out of your mind?” said smiling Lucy. “I was a safe enough inmate, surely. I wonder how often I am out of your mind, Mary dear, night or day.”
“That is true enough,” said Miss Wodehouse, “but you know that is not what I meant either. Lucy, are you quite sure you’re going on just as you ought—”
Here she made a troubled pause, and looked in the laughing face opposite, intent upon her with its startled eyes. “What have I done?” cried the younger sister. Miss Wodehouse shook her head with a great deal of seriousness.
“It always begins with laughing,” said the experienced woman; “but if it ends without tears it will be something new to me. It’s about Mr. Wentworth, Lucy. You’re always together, day after day; and, my dear, such things can’t go on without coming to something—what is to come of it? I have looked at it from every point of view, and I am sure I don’t know.”
Lucy flushed intensely red, of course, at the Curate’s name; perhaps she had not expected it just at that moment; but she kept her composure like a sensible girl as she was.
“I thought it was the other side that were questioned about their intentions,” she said. “Am I doing anything amiss? Mr. Wentworth is the Curate of St. Roque’s, and I am one of the district-visitors, and we can’t help seeing a great deal of each other so long as this work goes on at Wharfside. You wouldn’t like to stop a great work because we are obliged to see a good deal of—of one particular person?” said Lucy, with youthful virtue, looking at her sister’s face; at which tone and look Miss Wodehouse immediately faltered, as the culprit knew she must.
“No—oh no, no—to be sure not,” said the disturbed monitor. “When you say that, I don’t know how to answer you. It must be right, I suppose. I am quite sure it is wonderful to see such young creatures as you, and how you can tell the right way to set about it. But things did not use to be so in my young days. Girls dare not have done such things twenty years ago—not in Carlingford, Lucy,” said Miss Wodehouse; “and, dear, I think you ought to be a little careful, for poor Mr. Wentworth’s sake.”
“I don’t think Mr. Wentworth is in any particular danger,” said Lucy, putting down her cup, with a slight curve at the corners of her pretty mouth—“and it is quite time for you to begin dressing. You know you don’t like to be hurried, dear;” with which speech the young housekeeper got up from her easy-chair, gave her sister a kiss as she passed, and went away, singing softly, to her toilette. Perhaps there was a little flutter in Lucy’s heart as she bound it round with her favourite blue ribbons. Perhaps it was this that gave a certain startled gleam to her blue eyes, and made even her father remark them when she went downstairs—“It seems to me as if this child were growing rather pretty, Molly, eh? I don’t know what other people think,” said Mr. Wodehouse—and perhaps Mr. Wentworth, who was just being ushered into the drawing-room at the moment, heard the speech, for he, too, looked as if he had never found it out before. Luckily there was a party, and no opportunity for sentiment. The party was in honour of the Rector and his wife; and Mr. Wentworth could not but be conscious before the evening was over that he had done something to lose the favour of his clerical brother. There was a good deal of Church talk, as was natural, at the churchwarden’s table, where three clergymen were dining—for Mr. Morgan’s curate was there as well; and the Curate of St. Roque’s, who was slightly hot-tempered, could not help feeling himself disapproved of. It was not, on the whole, a satisfactory evening. Mr. Morgan talked rather big, when the ladies went away, of his plans for the reformation of Carlingford. He went into statistics about the poor, and the number of people who attended no church, without taking any notice of that “great work” which Mr. Wentworth knew to be going on at Wharfside. The Rector even talked of Wharfside, and of the necessity of exertion on behalf of that wretched district, with a studious unconsciousness of Mr. Wentworth; and all but declined to receive better information when Mr. Wodehouse proffered it. Matters were scarcely better in the drawing-room, where Lucy was entertaining everybody, and had no leisure for the Perpetual Curate. He took his hat with a gloomy sentiment of satisfaction when it was time to go away; but when the green door was closed behind him, Mr. Wentworth, with his first step into the dewy darkness, plunged headlong into a sea of thought. He had to walk down the whole length of Grange Lane to his lodging, which was in the last house of the row, a small house in a small garden, where Mrs. Hadwin, the widow of a whilom curate, was permitted by public opinion, on the score of her own unexceptionable propriety,1 to receive a lodger without loss of position thereby. It was moonlight, or rather it ought to have been moonlight, and no lamps were lighted in Grange Lane, according to the economical regulations of Carlingford; and as Mr. Wentworth pursued his way down the dark line of garden-walls, in
