Isa clung to me in floods of tears, desiring me not to believe anything so cruel and false.  Every one always was so hard upon her, she said, and she had only put the thing inadvertently there, to get it out of sight, into the first book she saw, but unfortunately she did not know I had heard her trying to pass it off to Charley as a jest.  However, as there was no proof there, I asked about the parasol.  While the shopping was going on, she and young Horne had been in another street, and this was the consequence!  I was perfectly confounded.  Receive presents from young men!  It seemed to me quite impossible.  “Oh, Isa thinks nothing of that!” said Charley.  “Ask her where she got those bangles, and that bouquet which she told you was half Metelill’s.  You think me awful, I know, Aunt Charlotte, but I do draw a line, though I would never have said one word about it if she had not played this nasty trick on Metelill.”  Isa would have begun some imploring excuse, but our two gentlemen were seen coming up towards the window, and she fled, gasping out an entreaty that I would not tell Uncle Martyn.

Nor did I then and there, for I needed to understand the matter and look into it, so I told Martyn and Horace not to wait for me, and heard Charley’s story more coolly.  I had thought that Mr. Horne was Metelill’s friend.  “So he was at first,” Charley said, “but he is an uncommon goose, and Isa is no end of a hand at doing the pathetic poverty-stricken orphan!  That’s the way she gets so many presents!” Then she explained, in her select slang, that young Horne’s love affairs were the great amusement of his fellow-pupils, and that she, being sure that the parasol was no present from me, as Isa had given the cousins to understand, had set Bertie Elwood to extract the truth by teasing his friend.  “But I never meant to have told,” said Charley, “if you had not come in upon us, when I was in the midst of such a wax that I did not know what I was saying”; and on my demanding what she meant by the elegant expression she had used about Isa and me, she explained that it was the schoolboy’s word for currying favour.  Every one but we stupid elders perceived the game, nay, even the Druces, living in full confidence with their children, knew what was going on.  I have never spoken, but somehow people must read through one’s brains, for there was a general conviction that I was going to choose a niece to accompany us.  I wonder if you, my wise brother, let out anything to Edith.  It is what men always do, they bind women to silence and then disclose the secret themselves, and say, “Nothing is safe with these women.”

Any way, these girls have been generous, or else true to their esprit de corps, I do not know which to call it; for though they looked on at Isa’s manoeuvres and my blindness with indignant contempt, they never attempted to interfere.  Jane Druce was seized with a fit of passionate wrath and pity for me, but her father withheld her from disclosures, assuring her that I should probably find out the girl’s true disposition, and that it would be wrong to deprive Isa of a chance of coming under a fresh influence.