Part 40 (2/2)

'You didn't, Gillian!'

'Yes, I did, and the stupid woman only wanted to kiss me (but I wouldn't let her) and said I was very right to stand up for my dear mamma. As if that had anything to do with it! What are you laughing at, mamma? Why, Uncle Regie is laughing, and Cousin Rotherwood! What is it?'

'At the two partisans who never stand up for their own families,' said Uncle Regie.

'But it's true!' cried Gillian.

'What! that I am never mistaken nor deceived?' said Lady Merrifield.

'Except when you took Miss Constance for a sensible woman, eh?' said her brother.

'That I never did! But I did take her for a moderately honourable one.'

'Well, that was a mistake,' owned Gillian. 'And Miss Hacket is as bad!

There's no grat.i.tude---'

'Hus.h.!.+' broke in her mother; and Gillian stopped abashed, while Lady Merrifield continued, 'I won't have Miss Hacket abused. She is only blinded by sisterly affection.'

'I don't think I can go there again,' said Gillian, 'after what she said about you.'

'Nonsense!' said her mother. 'Don't be as bad as Constance in trying to make me angry by telling me all poor Dolly's grumblings.'

'Follow your mother's example, Gillian,' said Lord Rotherwood, 'and, if possible, never hear, certainly never attend to, what any one says of you behind your back.'

'Is said to have said of you, you should add, Rotherwood,' put in the colonel. 'It is a decree worse than eavesdropping.'

'Oh, Regie!' exclaimed his sister.

'Well, not perhaps for your own honour and conscience, but the keyhole is a more trustworthy medium than the reporter.'

'That's a strong way of stating it, but, at any rate, the keyhole has no temper nor imagination, or prejudice of its own,' said Lady Merrifield.

'No, and as far as it goes, it enables you to judge of the frame in which the words, even if correctly reported, were spoken,' added Colonel Mohun.

'The moral of which is,' said Lord Rotherwood, drolly, 'that Gillian is not to take notice of anyone's observations upon her unless she has heard them through the keyhole.'

'And so one would never hear them at all.'

'Q. E. D.,' said Lord Rotherwood. 'And now, Lily, do you. ever sing the two evening-hymns. Ken and Keble, now, as the family used to do on Sundays at the Old Court, long ere the days of 'Hymns Ancient and Modern'?

'Don't we?' said Lady Merrifield. 'Only all our best voices will be singing it at Rawul Pindee!'

And, as she struck a note on the piano, all the younger people still up, Mysie, Phyllis, Wilfred and Valetta, gathered round from the outer room to join in their evening Sunday delight. Fly put her hand into her father's and whispered, 'You told me about it, daddy.' He began to sing, but his voice thickened as he missed the tones once a.s.sociated with it.

And Lady Merrifield, too, nearly broke down as with all her heart she sang, hopefully,

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