“Well, I must say that is very odd, considering I invited her to spend the day, and, I think, rather disrespectful of me—­to us both, Maria.”

“She might have been tired after the party last night,” put in Aunt Maria.

“No, she wasn’t tired, for she never told me so.” said Arthur.  “She told me to say—­not you, Phillis, mother always trusts me with her messages—­ that she had gone back on account of papa’s wanting her, and that if he came to fetch us, she would come here with him in the evening.”

“Very devoted!  ‘An old man’s darling and a young man’s slave,’ runs the proverb; but Mrs. Grey seems to reverse it.  She will soon never stir out an inch without your brother, Maria.”

“And I am sure my brother never looks so happy as when she is beside him,” said Aunt Maria.  “We shall quite enjoy seeing them both together to-night.”

“And I only wish it had been my good fortune to join such a pleasant family party,” observed Sir Edwin Uniacke.

It was rather too broad a hint, presuming even upon Miss Gascoigne’s large courtesy.  In dignified silence she passed it over, sending the children and Phillis away to their early dinner, and after an interval of that lively conversation, in which, under no circumstances, did Sir Edwin ever fail, allowing him also to depart.

As he went down the garden, Miss Grey, with great dismay, watched him stop at her beautiful jessamine bower, pull half a dozen of the white stars, smell at them, and throw them away.  He would have done the same—­perhaps had done it—­with far diviner things than jessamine flowers.

“Yes,” said Miss Gascoigne, looking after him, and then sitting down opposite Miss Grey, spreading out her wide silk skirts, and preparing herself solemnly for a wordy war—­that is, if it could be called a war which was all on one side—­“yes, I have come to the bottom of it all.  I knew I should.  Nothing ever escapes me.  And pray, Maria, what do you think of her now.”

“Think of whom?”

“You are so dull when you won’t hear.  Of your sister-in-law, Christian Grey.”

Poor Aunt Maria looked up with a helpless pretense of ignorance.  “What about her.  Henrietta, dear?”

“Pshaw!  You know as well as I do, only you are so obtuse, or so meek,” (A mercy she was, or she would never have lived a week, not to say twenty years, with Henrietta Gascoigne.) “Once for all, tell me what you propose doing?”

“Doing?  I?”

“Yes, you.  Can’t you see, my dear Maria, that it is your business to inform your brother what you have discovered concerning his wife?”

“Discovered?”

“Certainly; it is a discovery, since she has never told it—­never told her husband that before her marriage she had been in the habit of singing duets (love-songs, no doubt, most improper for any young woman) with a young gentleman of Sir Edwin’s birth and position, who, of course, never thought of marrying her—­(your brother, I do believe, is the only man in Avonsbridge who would have so committed himself)—­ and who, by the light way he speaks of her, evidently shows how little respect he had for her.”