“Perhaps,” mildly suggested Aunt Maria, “perhaps she really has told dear Arnold.”

“Then why did he not tell us—­tell me?  Why did he place me in the very awkward position of not knowing of this previous acquaintance of his wife’s?  Why, in that very unpleasant conversation we had one day at the Lodge, was I the only person to be kept in ignorance of his reasons—­ and very good reasons I now see they were—­for forbidding Sir Edwin’s visits?  Singing duets together!  Who knows but that they may meet and sing them still?  That new piano! and we turned out of the house directly afterward—­literally turned out!  But perhaps that was the very reason she did it—­that she might meet him the more freely.  Oh, Maria! your poor deluded brother!”

It is strange the way some women have—­men too, but especially women—­of rolling and rolling their small snowball of wrath until it grows to an actual mountain, which has had dragged into it all sorts of heterogeneous wrongs, and has grown harder and blacker day by day, till no sun of loving-kindness will ever thaw it more.  In vain did poor Maria ejaculate her pathetic “Oh, Henrietta!” and try, in her feeble way, to put in a kindly word or two; nothing availed.  Miss Gascoigne had lashed herself up into believing firmly every thing she had imagined and it was with an honest expression of real grief and pain that she repeated over and over again, “What ought we to do?  Your poor, dear brother!”

For, with all her faults, Miss Gascoigne was a conscientious woman; one who, so far as she saw her duty, tried to fulfill it, and as strongly, perhaps a little more so, insisted on other people’s fulfilling theirs.  She stood aghast at the picture, her own self-painted picture, of the kind brother-in-law, of whom in her heart she was really fond, married to a false, wicked woman, more than twenty years his junior, who mocked at his age and peculiarities, and flirted behind his back with any body and every body.  To do Aunt Henrietta justice, however, of more than flirtation she did not suspect—­no person with common sense and ordinary observation could suspect—­Christian Grey.

“I must speak to her myself, poor thing!  I must open her eyes to the danger she is running.  Only consider, Maria, if that story did go about Avonsbridge, she would never be thought well of in society again.  I must speak to her.  If she will only confide in me implicitly, so that I can take her part, and assure every body I meet that, however bad appearances may be as regards this unlucky story, there is really no-thing in it—­nothing at all—­don’t you see, Maria?”

Alas!  Maria had been so long accustomed to look at every thing through the vision of dear Henrietta, that she had no clear sight of her own whatever.  She only found courage to say, in a feeble way,

“Take care, oh, do take care!  I know you are much cleverer than I am, and can manage things far better; but oh please take care?”