“Oh, yes, I have seen her,” said another, faltering, while the other members of the party broke up suspiciously, and began to talk to each other with great earnestness. Lucy had thought no evil when she came in, to see all the heads together, but this breaking up and evident desire to conceal the subject of discussion roused her. These were the sort of conversations that went on through the hospitable house. When Sir John was alone for a few minutes with the Judge, who had been the friend of his youth, that learned functionary took him by the buttonhole, and said, “What’s this, what’s this, Curtis, I hear about your son?” They talked of it under Lady Curtis’s eye in the drawing-room as they sipped their tea. Poor Arthur had been cast off by his family, they said; he must have been living a bad life before, or he could never have been thrown in the way of such a person, and never could have married her. Had he married her? that was the next question. Or was it not altogether disreputable, the connection itself and everything about it? So they talked; and Lucy for once got to feel it in the air, and to lose her temper sometimes at the sense of this strange mass of secret criticism of which her family was the object. She made an assault upon her cousin, the Rector, in the midst of it with nervous vehemence. He had been talking to Miss Wilton, the lady who had rushed into a description of Mrs. Kenworthy, when Lucy came into the room that morning and interrupted more important talk. Lucy, watching, had perceived that Bertie had held back while the other had been pressing questions upon him, and that after the interview Miss Wilton had hurried to a pair of expecting friends, and communicated to them the information which she had acquired. Miss Curtis called her cousin to her with a somewhat imperious gesture, a gesture, however, which he was very willing to obey.