She said
she'd lost touch with her darling husband and he'd never come back to her
again."
"Biddy!" Horror undisguised sounded in Dinah's low voice. "He never did
such a thing as that!"
"He did that!" A queer species of triumph was apparent in Biddy's
rejoinder; malice twinkled for a second in her eyes. "I've told ye! I've
told ye!" she said. And then, with sharp anxiety. "But ye'll not tell
anyone as ye know, Miss Dinah. Ye promised, now didn't ye? Miss Isabel
wouldn't that any should know--not even Master Scott. He was away when it
happened, dining down at the Vicarage he was. And Miss Isabel she says to
me, 'For the life of ye, don't tell Master Scott! He'd be that angry,'
she says, 'and Sir Eustace would murder him entirely if it came to a
quarrel.' She was that insistent, Miss Dinah, and I knew there was truth
in what she said. Master Scott has the heart of a lion. He never knew the
meaning of fear from his babyhood. And Sir Eustace is a monster of
destruction when once his blood's up. And he minds what Master Scott says
more than anyone. So I promised, Miss Dinah dear, the same as you have.
And so he doesn't know to this day. Sir Eustace, ye see, has been in a
touchy mood all along, ever since ye left. Like gunpowder he's been, and
Master Scott has had a difficult enough time with him; and Miss Isabel
has kept it from him so that he thinks it was just your going again that
made her fret so.
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