appeal, did not exactly see his way to parry the demand, and wrote upon the envelope, “Mrs. Lygon, Long Edgecombe, Herefordshire.”
“Won’t you put Mrs. Eatoncamp’s name? We country people like that done.”
“Mrs. Eatoncamp?” replied Arthur. And it occurred to him, poor fellow, in his strait, that if he adopted that blunder, and the letter miscarried
And he wrote “Mrs. Eatoncamp.” And if he had looked at Mrs. Berry at that moment, he would have seen a sudden light come into her light eyes. She knew well what name he had mentioned. And here he deliberately wrote another, one of her own supplying. Stop a moment! He and her husband had been whispering, for she had heard the child laughingly rebuke them. What did they whisper about? They started, at all events, saying they were going to Marfield, and the very next moment they drove off in another direction. Why did Mr. Lygon, who is foolishly confidential with that spoiled brat, tell her that his telegraph-message was all right, and why did Mr. Berry leave me to imagine they had sent? Now—he does not want a letter sent to his wife, and he puts a false name on it. That light which Arthur Lygon did not see in her light eyes was the flash of the powder on which the spark had fallen. “They are keeping a secret of some kind from me,” said Mrs. Berry’s thin lips, inaudibly. “Let me see how long they will keep it.”
And it was not with the sweetest expression in her face that she left the room to write her letter, though her high voice became almost caressing as she bade Arthur make haste over his despatch, and she would say everything that was kind for him to Laura.
Into the library hastened Mrs. Berry, for she was a practical woman, and knew where to look for knowledge, which is the next best thing to having knowledge. A Gazetteer was open before her in a minute.
“No such place,” she said, again looking at tin envelope. “But then it may be a small place, not worth mentioning.” You see, she wished for a conclusion, but did not jump at it, which shows that she would never have made a good interpreter of the prophecies.
“Looking out a very gigantic polysyllable for our discomfiture, my dear?” said Mr. Berry, who was at the window. “That’s not the dictionary.”
“I believe I know a dictionary as well as yourself,” said his wife, repressing any more tart rejoinder. “But I never know where to find your books. Is there any book here that tells of small places, not important enough for maps and gazetteers?”
“There’s Pigott,” said Mr. Barry, “those large red volumes on your left. They mention every hole and corner in the kingdom. What county do you want?”
“Devonshire,” said Mrs. Berry.
“Well, you’ll see the name on the back,” said her husband as he left the room.
No Long Edgecombe in Herefordshire, nor, though Mrs. Berry took the trouble to go quite through the lists, was there among the Nobility, Gentry, or Clergy, such a name as Lygon had given her.
“They are playing tricks with me,” said Mrs. Berry, feeling herself personally wronged, and trying a mental examination of the enemy’s position, in order to see what could be done in the way of revenge.
Now, people who call themselves practical will probably say—
“I have no patience with the woman.”
Now that is wrong, to begin with. We are bound to have patience with everybody, and especially with women.
“I should like to take her by the shoulders and”
Stop again. That would be rude and coarse. The man who lays his hand upon a woman, save in For shame! Must a player be called in with a clap-trap, to rebuke your violence?
“And say, ‘Why, you meddling, spiteful old fool’”
Exceptionable language, and one half of it unjust. Mrs. Berry was not five-and-forty, and was no fool.
“‘Your husband is a solicitor, and so is taken into people’s confidence.’”
Mr. Berry has retired from practice, and has no more right to keep secrets from his wife than any other private gentleman.
“‘And what business have you to pry into his affairs?{{sp|’]}”
And you call yourself a practical person, and yet think that talking in that way to a shrewd, determined, venomous-minded woman of middle age will deter her from taking a course which I perceive by that recurrent light in her light eyes she intends to take, although at present she has no idea where it will lead her. Well, if it relieves your mind at this period of the history to say that you would like to shake Mrs. Berry by the shoulders, avail yourself of that relief. But be sure that her mind is made up for mischief, and a shake like that of the earthquake of Lisbon will never shake that resolve away from behind those light eyes.
Mrs. Berry took Arthur Lygon’s letter from him—it was addressed to a friend in Somerset House, and she would have liked to open it, but there was but one kettle in the house, and that was in the kitchen, where the servants were too busy to be sent away while the lady should hold the letter in the steam. If he had sealed it, I think she would have kept it back for private examination, but as he had merely fastened it in the ordinary way, she let it go—the rather that as the boy was waiting, it was necessary to give him one letter, and she had no immediate intention of parting with Arthur’s envelope. If she had performed upon the Somerset House letter the process which it is understood is very largely practised upon the epistolary literature of the time (and certainly the business of masters and mistresses is curiously familiar to their dependents in these days), the lady would have found only a scribbled request to a friend to order the double-sashed windows of the writer’s office to be cleaned during his absence. That letter went, the writer