Winifred has caught a very annoying trick of turning to him on all occasions, as if waiting to know what he thought before making up her mind. Altogether I don't like the look of things at all.
Of course there was no getting out of inviting Mr. Flint to the little birthday party which we were planning for Nora Costello. To tell the truth, nobody but me seemed to want to get out of it. Professor Anstice says he is the most agreeable man that comes to the house, and when I confided to him that I was afraid Winifred would fall in love with him, he answered: "She might do worse. She might do much worse." That was all the consolation I got in that quarter, and with Winifred herself it was as bad. I thought it might do good to recall some of her early impressions, which seem to have changed so mightily of late.
"Don't you remember," I said, "how you called him a refrigerator?"
"Did I?" she said with a little laugh. "Well, he was rather frigid in those days."
"Yes, and you said how disagreeable his manners were, and how thoughtless he was of every one but himself."
At this Winifred colored up as if they hadn't been her own very words. "If I said it," she answered with a little toss of her head, "or if anybody else said it, it was a stupid slander, which grows stupider every time it is repeated."
I was a little nettled myself at her answering me like that. "You didn't think so," I said, "when you begged him to go away from Nepaug."
At this Winifred jumped straight up from her chair, running her hand through her hair in a way she has when she is excited--"Did you hear that? Then you must have been listening," she cried out, as if she were accusing me of chicken-stealing.
"If you think that of me, Winifred, the sooner my trunk is packed the better," I answered, as stiff as the Captain's monument on Duxbury Hill.
In an instant Winifred was on her knees by my side, and had thrown her arms around my neck.
"No, no, dear Miss Standish, I do not think it, and I ought not to have said it. It only made me feel so badly to think of any one's having overheard my secret, which after all was not my own."
Now here was my chance to find out the very thing which had been bothering my old head all these weeks. I had only to pretend to know and I should hear it all, for Winifred was in one of her rare confidential moods. But that inconvenient New England conscience of mine not only would not let me pretend, but it pricked me a little with Winifred's accusation of having listened. Perhaps if my ears had not been strained just a trifle, I should not have caught as much as I did of the conversation at Flying Point. Anyway, I felt bound to confess now.