“You are a poor dissembler, Rhoda. You may go to your room now. Of course you allowed this man, this hypocritical _good_ clergyman, to lead you into deception. You let him fancy--for it _is_ only fancy on your part--that--” “O mamma,--dear mamma,” the girl cried in an agony of shame and grief, “if you would only listen to me,--only believe that I never did, never could have done all you say! I wish I could tell you how it was; and yet it seems--indeed it does--as if I had nothing--_nothing_ really to tell. We used to meet--Mr. Wallingford and I--sometimes at the school, and at the poor people’s cottages. He is so good, mamma,” gaining a little courage when she found herself listened to without rebuke. “If you could but know how much the sick and the old think of him, and all he does for them, you would not wonder at--” “At his doing one of the most unprincipled acts of which a man can be capable,” sneered Lady Millicent. “He was perfectly well aware--he says so in his letter--that I should be intensely angry at his presumption; and yet--really, Rhoda, I have no patience with your folly and wrongheadedness--you stand up for this priggish, formal, underhand--” “But he has not been underhand, mamma. As Mr. Wallingford is not here to tell you so himself, _I_ must say the truth; and that is, that never till the day before we left Gillingham did he say one word that you might not have heard, and then he only”--and the colour deepened on her cheek--“said that he should miss me--should think of me till I came back, and that he hoped I would not quite forget Gillingham and--and ‘good things’ while I was away.” Lady Millicent laughed scornfully. “For Gillingham read Mr. Wallingford, and for good things the delights, I suppose, of Switcham Parsonage,--boiled leg of mutton and what is called, I believe, a parlour-maid to wait upon you. My dear Rhoda, be thankful that such a fate as becoming the wife of a poor country parson is not in store for you. And now, my dear, you may go, as I said before, to your own room. There is no occasion to make this sort of thing public. _I_ shall of course answer Mr. Wallingford’s letter, and I think I may venture to say that we are not likely to be troubled further on the subject. There, there, that will do; I am very much engaged this morning,”--arresting the words which she could see were hovering on her daughter’s lips,--“and I can afford to waste no more time on such nonsense as this.”