The Squire was pleased with his own speech and his own thought, and
smiled a little as he finished speaking. Mr. Gibson was both pleased
and amused; and he smiled too, anxious as he was to be gone. The next
Thursday was soon fixed upon as the day on which Mr. Gibson was to
bring his womenkind out to the Hall. He thought that, on the whole,
the interview had gone off a good deal better than he had expected,
and felt rather proud of the invitation of which he was the bearer.
Therefore Mrs. Gibson's manner of receiving it was an annoyance to
him. She, meanwhile, had been considering herself as an injured woman
ever since the evening of the day of Roger's departure; what business
had any one had to speak as if the chances of Osborne's life being
prolonged were infinitely small, if in fact the matter was uncertain?
She liked Osborne extremely, much better than Roger; and would gladly
have schemed to secure him for Cynthia, if she had not shrunk from
the notion of her daughter's becoming a widow. For if Mrs. Gibson had
ever felt anything acutely it was the death of Mr. Kirkpatrick; and,
amiably callous as she was in most things, she recoiled from exposing
her daughter wilfully to the same kind of suffering which she herself
had experienced. But if she had only known Dr. Nicholls' opinion she
would never have favoured Roger's suit; never. And then Mr. Gibson
himself; why was he so cold and reserved in his treatment of her
since that night of explanation? She had done nothing wrong; yet she
was treated as though she were in disgrace. And everything about
the house was flat just now. She even missed the little excitement
of Roger's visits, and the watching of his attentions to Cynthia.
Cynthia too was silent enough; and as for Molly, she was absolutely
dull and out of spirits, a state of mind so annoying to Mrs. Gibson
just now, that she vented some of her discontent upon the poor girl,
from whom she feared neither complaint nor repartee.