The Gold of Chickaree — Part 6

'Nonsense, Prudentia!' said her sister. 'He won't be the one; and it proves nothing if she was waltzing with him. Why shouldn't she waltz with him, as well as with anybody else?'

'You'll see,' said Prudentia. 'Answer my question, Arthur. Was it a waltz?'

'A waltz they call it,' said Dr. Arthur, with considerable disgust. 'I should choose a longer name, and call it an abomination.'

'I don't believe Arthur is a good witness, Prim,' said Rollo. 'His testimony gets confused. Does he ever go walking in his sleep in these days—nights, I mean?'

'I was awake then,' said Dr. Arthur. 'And why you women don't put that thing down!'——

'Arthur!' said Prim, half laughing but half fearful too, 'it's rather hard on the people who don't go, to tell them they ought to put a stop to it; and the people who do go, some of them, do it very innocently.'

'Yes!' said Dr. Arthur, 'and any man who takes such a young, pure face into the whirligig ought to be shot!'

'I daresay she'll marry Sir Henry Crofton,' said Mrs. Coles.

But Rollo did not seem terrified, and did not seem to pay much attention to the whole thing, she thought. He was rather silent the rest of the dinner; but so he had been the former part of it, ever since Dr. Arthur had come home to talk. To Prudentia he never said more words than were civilly necessary. As soon as dinner was over he mounted and rode away.

Wych Hazel had not wanted to come home. But neither did she at all wish to arouse Mr. Falkirk's suspicions by a too strenuous resistance; and besides, when he really made up his mind to a thing, she had to yield; so, with much secret trepidation, and a particularly wayward outside development, she made the journey; and late the next night after Dr. Arthur's revelations, laid her head on the pillows on her own room at Chickaree, with a strange little feeling of gladness, that half began to take the trepidation in hand. Well—it was not the end of September yet: she would have a little breathing space. And then—Wych Hazel dropped asleep.

Things 'happen,' as we say, strangely sometimes. Threads which should lie smooth and straight alongside of each other and make no confusion, get all snarled, and twisted, and thrown crosswise of each other by just a little breeze of influence, or some slight impulse on one side. And so it fell next day.