"If she would only let me drop him a friendly line asking him, for
her sake, to contradict this horrid slander!" the distraught matron
had sighed, last night, in her recapitulation of the conversation
with her obdurate niece. "But she will not hear of it."
"I hardly think he would like it either," Rosa had rejoined. "It
would hint at distrust on your part or on hers. Mr. Aylett's letter
should be sufficient to elicit the defence you crave."
"You are in the right, perhaps!" But Mrs. Sutton had looked
miserably discontented. "Yet to be frank with you, Rosa, Winston is
not apt to be conciliatory in his measures when he takes it into his
head that the family honor is assailed. I am afraid he has written
haughtily, if not insolently, to poor Frederic."
Rosa had no doubt of this, even while she answered, "Neither
haughtiness nor downright insolence would prevent a man who has so
much at stake as has Mr. Chilton, from taking instant steps to
re-establish himself in the respect of the family he desires to
enter. This is a very delicate matter--take what view of it we may.
Hadn't you better wait a few days before you interfere? Nothing can
be lost--something may be gained by prudent delay."
"And I suppose Winston WOULD be very much displeased at my
officiousness, as he would term it," had been Mrs. sutton's
reluctant concession to her young guest's discreet counsels. "But it
is very hard to remain quiet, and see everything going to
destruction about one!"
She had evidently reconsidered her resolution to let things take
their wrong-headed course, and in virtue of her prerogatives as
match-maker and mender, had thrust her oar into the very muddy
whirlpool boiling about the bark of her darling's happiness.
Rosa wrought out this chain of sequences, with many other links,
stretching far past present exigences and possibilities, ere Mabel's
figure disappeared behind the shoulder of the hill rising beyond the
brook. Should Frederic Chilton receive that letter, in less than a
week--in three days, perhaps, for he was a man prompt to resolve and
to do--he would present himself at Ridgeley to speak in his own
behalf--an event Rosa considered eminently undesirable. Certainly
Mabel's pusillanimity merited no such reward. She had no right to
question the rectitude that one she professed to love, nor her aunt
the right to act as mediator. If Mabel Aylett, with her found sense
and judgment, and her inherent strength of will, would not hold fast
to her faith in her affianced husband, and defy her brother to
sunder them, let her lose that which she prized so lightly.