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“Indeed! And was Jenny engaged to him? Julius told me that Mrs. Douglas had been his mother’s dearest friend, and that this Archie had been brought up with them, but he did not say any more.”
“Perhaps he did not like having had a cousin in an attorney’s office. I am sure I had no notion of such a thing.”
Rosamond laughed till she was exhausted at the notion of Julius’s sharing the fastidious objections she heard in Cecil’s voice; and then, struck by the sadness of the story, she cried, “And that makes them all so fond of Miss Bowater. Poor girl, what must she not have gone through! And yet how cheerful she does look!”
“People say,” proceeded Cecil, unable to resist the impulse to acquire a partaker in her half-jealous aversion, “that it was a great disappointment that Mrs. Poynsett could not make her sons like her as much as she did herself.”
“Oh!” cried Rosamond, “how little peace we should have if we always heeded what people say!”
“People that know,” persisted Cecil.
“Not very wise or very kind people to say so,” quoth Rosamond; “though, by the bye, the intended sting is happily lost, considering that it lies among five.”
“Why should you assume a sting?”
“Because I see you are stung, and want to sting me,” said Rosamond, in so merry a tone that the earnestness was disguised.
“I! I’m not stung! What Mrs. Poynsett or Miss Bowater may have schemed is nothing to me,” said Cecil, with all her childish dignity.
“People talk of Irish imagination,” said Rosamond in her lazy meditative tone.
“Well?” demanded Cecil, sharply.
“Only it is not my Irish imagination that has devised this dreadful picture of the artful Jenny and Mrs. Poynsett spinning their toils to entrap the whole five brothers. Come, Cecil, take my advice and put it out of your head. Suppose it were true, small blame to Mrs. Poynsett.”
“What do you mean?” said Cecil, in a voice of hurt dignity.
“I may mean myself.” And Rosamond’s peal of merry laughter was most amazing and inexplicable to her companion, who was not sure that she was not presuming to laugh at her.
There was a silence, broken at last by Rosamond. “Cecil, I have been tumbled about the world a good deal more than you have, and I never found that one got any good by disregarding the warnings of the natives. There’s an immense deal in the cat and the cock.”
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