Margaret Maliphant

								

disposed towards him, but I did not feel perfectly sure.
"We asked him to come in, didn't we, Joyce?" added I, looking at her.
"Yes, we did," murmured my sister, bending very low over her plate.
"Asked him to come where?" asked mother.
"Why, here, to be sure," cried I, growing bolder. "He drove us home,
you know."
Mother said nothing, for Deborah had just brought in the pudding, and
she was always very discreet before servants at meal-times. But she
closed her lips in a way that I knew, and her face assumed an aggrieved
kind of expression that she only put on to me; when Joyce was in the
wrong, she always scolded her quite frankly. There was silence until
Deborah had left the room. She went out with a smile on her face which
always drove me into a frenzy, for it meant to say, "You are in for
it, and serve you right;" and I thought it was taking advantage of her
position in the family to notice any differences that occurred between
mother and the rest of us.
When Deborah had gone out, shutting the door rather noisily, mother
laid down her knife and fork. She did not look at me at all, she looked
at Joyce. That was generally the way she punished me.
"You don't mean to say, Joyce, that you allowed a strange gentleman
to get into the trap before all the townsfolk!" said she. "You're the
eldest--you ought to have known better."
I could not stand this. "It isn't Joyce's fault," said I, boldly; "I
thought we were in luck's way when the gentleman offered to drive us.
He knew the mare, and of course I felt that we were safe."
"It will be all over the place to-morrow," said mother, pathetically.
"Well, the gentleman is the squire's nephew, and everybody knows what
friends you are with the squire," answered I, provokingly.
"You might see that makes it all the worse," answered mother. "I don't
know how ever I shall meet the squire again. I'm ashamed to think my
daughters should have behaved so unseemly. But the ideas of young women
in these days pass me. Such notions wouldn't have gone down in my day.
Young women were forced to mind themselves if they were to have a
chance of a husband. Your father would never have looked at me if I had
been one of that sort."
Father was in a brown-study. I do not think he had paid much attention
to the affair at all, but now he smiled as mother glanced across at
him, seeming to expect some recognition. She repeated her last remark
and then he said, bowing to her with old-fashioned gallantry, "I think
I should have looked at you, Mary, whatever your shortcomings had
been. You were too pretty to be passed over."
And he smiled again, as he never smiled at any one but mother; the
smile that, when it did come, lit up his face like a dash of broad
sunshine upon a rugged moor.
"But mother's quite right, lassies," added he; "a woman must be modest
and gentle, not self-seeking, nor eager for homage, or she'll never