“One of ’em.”

“With the tassel?”

“Ay!”

“It’s a great shame!  That’s what it is!  I’m sure he didn’t look a fool!  He’s been very badly treated, and I’ll—­”

She rose from the table, in sudden and speechless indignation.

“You should ha’ seen him, lass!” said James, and added:  “I wish ye had!” He tried to be calm.  But she had sprung on him another of her disconcerting surprises.  Was it, after all, possible, conceivable, that she was in love with Emanuel?

She sat down again.  “I know why you say that, uncle”—­she looked him in the face, and put her elbows on the table.  “Now, just listen to me!”

Highly perturbed, he wondered what was coming next.

CHAPTER XXII

CONFESSIONAL

“What’s the matter with Emanuel Prockter?” Helen asked; meaning, what were the implied faults of Emanuel Prockter.

There was defiance in her tone.  She had risen from the table, and she had sat down again, and she seemed by her pose to indicate that she had sat down again with a definite purpose, a purpose to do grievous harm to the soul’s peace of anybody who differed from the statements which she was about to enunciate, or who gave the wrong sort of answers to her catechism.  She was wearing her black mousseline dress (theoretically “done with"), which in its younger days always had the effect of rousing the grande dame in her.  She laid her ringless hands, lightly clasped, on a small, heavy, round mahogany table which stood in the middle of the little drawing-room, and she looked over James’s shoulder into the vistas of the great drawing-room.  The sombre, fading magnificence of the Wilbrahams—­a magnificence of dark woods, tasselled curtains, reps, and gilt—­was her theatre, and the theatre suited her mood.

Still, Jimmy Ollerenshaw, somewhat embittered by the catastrophe of the afternoon, conceived that he was not going to be brow-beaten.

“What’s the matter with Emanuel Prockter,” said he, “is as he’s probably gotten a cold by this.”

“Yes, and you’re glad!” Helen retorted.  “You think he looked a fool after he’d been in the water.  And you were glad.”

“I dunna think,” said James, “I’m sure.”

“But why should you be glad?  That’s what I want to know.”

James could not sagaciously reply to this query.  He merely scratched his head, tilting one of his Turkish caps to that end.

“The fact is,” she cried, with a grammatical carelessness which was shocking in a woman who had professed to teach everything, “every one has got their knives into Emanuel Prockter.  And it’s simply because he’s good-looking and well-dressed and sings beautifully.”

“Good-looking!” murmured James.

“Well, isn’t he?”

“He’s pretty,” said James.

“No one ever said he had a lot of brains—­”