Mrs. Curtis paused, Miss Wellwood was as pink as her cap strings.  Rachel grasped the meaning at last.  “Oh!” she said, with less reticence than her elders, “there must needs be a spice of flirtation to give piquancy to the mess of gossip!  I don’t wonder, there are plenty of people who judge others by themselves, and think that motive must underlie everything!  I wonder who imagines that I am fallen so low?”

“There, I knew she would take it in that way,” said Mrs. Curtis.  “And so you understand us, my dear, we could not bear to ask you to do anything so distressing except for your own sake.”

“I am far past caring for my own sake,” said Rachel, “but for yours and Grace’s, mother, I will give as much ocular demonstration as I can, that I am not pining for this hero with a Norman name.  I own I should have thought none of the Dean’s friends would have needed to be convinced.”

“Oh, no! no! but—­” Miss Wellwood made a great confusion of noes, buts, and my dears, and Mrs. Curtis came to the rescue.  “After all, my love, one can’t so much wonder!  You have always been very peculiar, you know, and so clever, and you took up this so eagerly.  And then the Greys saw you so unwilling to prosecute.  And—­and I have always allowed you too much liberty—­ever since your poor dear papa was taken—­and now it has come upon you, my poor child!  Oh, I hope dear Fanny will take warning by me,” and off went poor Mrs. Curtis into a fit of sobs.

“Mother—­mother! this is worse than anything,” exclaimed Rachel in an agony, springing to her feet, and flying after sal volatile, but feeling frightfully helpless without Grace, the manager of all Mrs. Curtis’s ailments and troubles.  Grace would have let her quietly cry it out.  Rachel’s remedies and incoherent protestations of all being her own fault only made things worse, and perhaps those ten minutes were the most overwhelming of all the griefs that Rachel had brought on herself.  However, what with Miss Wellwood’s soothing, and her own sense of the becoming, Mrs. Curtis struggled herself into composure again by the time the maid came to dress them for dinner; Rachel all the while longing for Grace’s return, not so much for the sake of hearing the verdict, as of knowing whether the mother ought to be allowed to go down to dinner, so shaken did she look; for indeed, besides her distress for her daughter, no small ingredient in her agitation was this recurrence to a stated custom of her husband’s magisterial days.

Persuasion was unavailing.  At any cost the Curtis family must present an unassailable front to the public eye, and if Mrs. Curtis had forced forward her much tried and suffering daughter, far more would she persist in devoting herself to gaiety and indifference, but her nervousness was exceeding, and betrayed itself in a continual wearying for Grace, without whom neither her own dress nor Rachel’s could be arranged to her satisfaction, and she was absolutely incapable