My lady looked at him over her spectacles:  but she only repeated the words “Miss Bessy,” and paused, as if trying to remember who such a person could be; and he, if he had then intended to say more, was quelled by her manner, and dropped the subject.  He went on to say, that he had thought it is duty to decline the subscription to his school offered by Mr. Brooke, because he was a Dissenter; that he (Mr. Gray) feared that Captain James, through whom Mr. Brooke’s offer of money had been made, was offended at his refusing to accept it from a man who held heterodox opinions; nay, whom Mr. Gray suspected of being infected by Dodwell’s heresy.

“I think there must be some mistake,” said my lady, “or I have misunderstood you.  Captain James would never be sufficiently with a schismatic to be employed by that man Brooke in distributing his charities.  I should have doubted, until now, if Captain James knew him.”

“Indeed, my lady, he not only knows him, but is intimate with him, I regret to say.  I have repeatedly seen the captain and Mr. Brooke walking together; going through the fields together; and people do say—­”

My lady looked up in interrogation at Mr. Gray’s pause.

“I disapprove of gossip, and it may be untrue; but people do say that Captain James is very attentive to Miss Brooke.”

“Impossible!” said my lady, indignantly.  “Captain James is a loyal and religious man.  I beg your pardon Mr. Gray, but it is impossible.”

CHAPTER XIV.

Like many other things which have been declared to be impossible, this report of Captain James being attentive to Miss Brooke turned out to be very true.

The mere idea of her agent being on the slightest possible terms of acquaintance with the Dissenter, the tradesman, the Birmingham democrat, who had come to settle in our good, orthodox, aristocratic, and agricultural Hanbury, made my lady very uneasy.  Miss Galindo’s misdemeanour in having taken Miss Bessy to live with her, faded into a mistake, a mere error of judgment, in comparison with Captain James’s intimacy at Yeast House, as the Brookes called their ugly square-built farm.  My lady talked herself quite into complacency with Miss Galindo, and even Miss Bessy was named by her, the first time I had ever been aware that my lady recognized her existence; but—­I recollect it was a long rainy afternoon, and I sat with her ladyship, and we had time and opportunity for a long uninterrupted talk—­whenever we had been silent for a little while she began again, with something like a wonder how it was that Captain James could ever have commenced an acquaintance with “that man Brooke.”  My lady recapitulated all the times she could remember, that anything had occurred, or been said by Captain James which she could now understand as throwing light upon the subject.