“When will she announce it, then?” he demanded.
“Ah!” I murmured. “You said she was a good player.”
“But a fire-eater!” he resumed. “For her. Oh, hang it! She’ll let him go!”
He hesitated. “Well, of course her game could be spoiled by--”
His speech died away into more cogitation, and I had to ask him what he meant.
We walked on through Worship Street, which we had reached some while since, and the chief features of which I mechanically pointed out to him.
“Jolly old church, that,” said Beverly, as we reached my favorite corner and brick wall. “Well, I’ll not announce it!” he murmured gallantly.
“My dear man,” I said, “Kings Port will do all the announcing for you to-morrow.”
But in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet surely, knowing Kings Port’s sovereign habit, as I had had good cause to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant’s affairs; buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and egregiously clear in the new-established void.
The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it did from Juno’s lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday’s meeting on the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two or three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going to tell you.
“I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the Custom House?”
I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the gardens at Live Oaks.