"Ahem!" she began, and the tone was not very reassuring "I knew you were here. Mrs. Browne told me, and I saw you there with Allen yesterday. I saw you years ago on the terrace at Aberystwyth, and remembered you well. Was Archie very sick when you left him?"
"Yes--no," Daisy said, stammeringly; "that is, he had been sick a long time, but I did not think him so bad or I should never have left him. Oh, auntie, it almost killed me when I heard he was dead, and there is a moan for him in my heart all the time."
She adopted this form of speech because it had sounded prettily to herself when she said it to Mrs. Browne, who had believed in the moan, but Miss Betsey did not.
"Ahem!" she said; "how much time have you spent with Archie the last ten years or so?"
"Not as much as I wish I had now. I was obliged to be away from him," Daisy replied, and the spinster continued: "Why?"
"My health was poor, and I was so much better out of England; and so, when people invited me, I went with them--it saved expense at home, and we are so poor, oh! you cannot know how poor;" and Daisy clasped her hands together despairingly as she gazed up at the stern face above her, which did not relax in its sternness, but remained so hard and stony that Daisy burst out impetuously: "Oh, auntie, why are you so cold to me. Why do you hate me so? I have never harmed you. I want you for my friend--mine and Bessie's; and we need a friend so much in our loneliness and poverty. Bessie is the sweetest, truest girl you ever knew."
For a moment Miss Betsey's hands moved rapidly among the pea-pods; then removing her spectacles and wiping them with the corner of her apron, she began: "I mean to treat everybody civilly in my own house, but if I say anything I must tell the naked truth. I believe Bessie is a true girl, as you say; but I have my doubts of you. I have heard much of your career; have talked with those who have seen you in that hell at Monte Carlo, bandying jests with young profligates and blear-eyed old men, more dangerous than the younger ones because better skilled in evil. I saw you myself on the terrace at Aberystwyth, flirting as no married woman should flirt with that whiffet, Lord Hardy, who, it seems, is here with you, and whom perhaps you think to capture now that you are free. But let me tell you that men seldom pick up and wear a soiled garment, particularly when they have helped to soil it. Lord Hardy will never marry you, and my advice is that you go home, as you ought to have done at once. Go back to your child and be a mother to her; but, as you hope for heaven, never try to drag her down where you are. You talk of poverty. You do not show it. Those diamonds in your ears never cost a small sum, nor that solitaire upon your finger."