"A peddler with a harelip! Marta, will you never be serious?"
"Some day, mother," Marta went on, "when we find the right man, you hold him while I propose, and together we'll surely--"
Mrs. Galland could not resist laughing, which was one way to stop further absurdities--absurdities concealing a nervous strain they happened to be this time--while Colonel Lanstron was a little flushed and ill at ease. She had a truly silvery laugh--the kind no longer in fashion among the gentry since golden laughs came in,--that went well with the dimples dipping into her pink cheeks.
Contrary to custom, she did not excuse herself immediately after luncheon for her afternoon nap, but kept battling with her nods until nature was victorious and the fell fast asleep. Marta, grown restless with impatience, suggested to Lanstron that they stroll in the garden, and they took the path past the house toward the castle tower, stopping in an arbor with high hedges on either side around a statue of Mercury.
"Now!" exclaimed Marta narrowly. "It was you, Lanny, who recommended Feller to us as a gardener, competent though deaf!" With literal brevity she told how she had proved him to be a man of most sensitive hearing. "I didn't let him know that he was discovered. I felt too much pity for him to do that. You brought him here--you, Lanny, you are the one to explain."
"True, he is not deaf!" Lanstron replied.
"You knew he was not deaf, while we wrote our messages to him and I have been learning the deaf-and-dumb alphabet! It was pretty fun, wasn't it?"
"Yes, a spy. You can put things in a bright light, Marta!" He found words coming with difficulty in face of the pain and disillusion of her set look.
"Using some broken man as a pawn; setting him as a spy in the garden where you have been the welcome friend!" she exclaimed. "A spy on what--on my mother, on Minna, on me, on the flowers, as a part of this monstrous game of trickery and lies that you are playing?"
There was no trace of anger in her tone. It was that of one mortally hurt. Anger would have been easier to bear than the measuring, penetrating wonder that found him guilty of such a horrible part. Those eyes would have confused Partow himself with the steady, welling intensity of their gaze. She did not see how his left hand was twitching and how he stilled its movement by pressing it against the bench.