Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/272

 see my own niece, my own brother’s child, the picture of misery that you were.” “Well, you’d look miserable,” said Phyllida, “if the one person you cared for had been set against you and if everybody said you’d tried to capture him and he’d run away.” Who it was that Phyllida imagined she was quoting I have really no idea. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that, if a girl conducts a love affair quite so ostentatiously as she had done, she must not be surprised if people ask questions when, all of a sudden, nothing comes of it. It was hardly the moment to talk about ostentation, however. You remember the terrace at the Hall; we were sitting there like people in the first row of the stalls, waiting for the curtain to go up—Brackenbury, Ruth, their boy Culroyd and Hilda, his wife, my brother-in-law Spenworth, his new wife, Arthur, Will and myself. I really pitied any poor young man with such an audience to face. . . “But all has now turned out well?,” I asked. “Dear Phyllida, I am very, very glad.” “Oh, don’t congratulate me yet,” she said. “He hasn’t said anything.”

I was really amazed. . . “I thought perhaps that, when you met at my house—,” I began.