"Did not your visit end as pleasantly as it began?" asked Elizabeth, who, though she was over-merciful in her judgments, was not without a good deal of sagacity and shrewdness. Something lay beyond the margin of Mattie's words, she could see that plainly; and then her father was getting impatient.
"Well, you see, that spoiled everything," returned Mattie, jumbling her narrative in the oddest manner. "Archie was so sorry, and so was I; and he got quite--you know his way when he feels uncomfortable. I thought Miss Challoner was joking at first,--that it was just a bit of make-believe fun,--until I saw how grave Miss Phillis, that is the second one, looked: and then the little one--at least, she is not little, but somehow one fancies she is--seemed as though she were going to cry."
"But what did Miss Challoner say to distress you and Mr. Drummond so?" asked Elizabeth, trying patiently to elicit facts and not vague statements from Mattie.
"Oh, she said--no, please don't think I am exaggerating, for it is all true--that they had lost their money, and were very poor, and, that she and her sisters were dressmakers."
"Dressmakers!" shouted the colonel, and his ruddy face grew almost purple with the shock: his very moustache seemed to bristle. "Dressmakers! my dear Miss Drummond, I don't believe a word of it! Those girls! It is a hoax!--a bit of nonsense from beginning to end!"
"Hush, father! you are putting Mattie out," returned Elizabeth, mildly. It was one of her idiosyncrasies to call people as soon as possible by their Christian names, though no one but her father and brother ever called her Elizabeth. Perhaps her gray hair, and a certain soft dignity that belonged to her, forbade such freedom. "Dear father, we must let Mattie speak." But even Elizabeth let her work lie unheeded in her lap in the engrossing interest of the subject.
"I do not mean they have been dressmakers all this time, but this is their plan for the future. Miss Challoner said they were not clever enough for governesses, and that they did not want to separate. But that is what they mean to do,--to make dresses for people who are not half so good as themselves."
"Preposterous! absurd!" groaned the colonel. "Where is their mother? What can the old lady be thinking about?" Mrs. Challoner was not an old lady by any means; but then the choleric colonel had never seen her, or he would not have applied that term to the aristocratic-looking gentlewoman whom Mattie had admired in Miss Milner's shop.