Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/257

Rh  of ignorance of the Gothic character was the further consequence, and the upshot of this, in turn, was the idea of appeal to Mr. Patten. Mr. Patten was the vicar and was known to interest himself, as such, in the ancient annals of Marr; in addition to which—and to its being even held a little that his sense of the affairs of the hour was sometimes sacrificed to such inquiries—he was a gentleman with a humour of his own, a flushed face, a bushy eyebrow, and a black wideawake worn sociably askew. 'He will tell us,' said Amy Frush, 'if there's anything in them.'

'Yet if it should be,' Susan suggested, 'anything we mayn't like?'

'Well, that's just what I'm thinking of,' returned Miss Amy in her offhand way. 'If it's anything we shouldn't know'

'We've only to tell him not to tell us? Oh, certainly,' said mild Miss Susan. She took upon herself even to give him that warning when, on the invitation of our friends, Mr. Patten came to tea and to talk things over; Miss Amy sitting by and raising no protest, but distinctly promising herself that, whatever there might be to be known, and however objectionable, she would privately get it out of their initiator. She found herself already hoping that it would be something too bad for her cousin—too bad for any one else at all—to know, and that it most properly might remain between them. Mr. Patten, at sight of the papers, exclaimed, perhaps a trifle ambiguously, and by no means clerically, 'My eye, what a lark!' and retired, after three cups of tea, in an overcoat bulging with his spoil.

 II

ten o clock that evening the pair separated, as usual, on the upper landing, outside their respective doors, for the night; but Miss Amy had hardly set down her candle on her