“You are a good boy; but I think this gentleman ought to have hesitated a little before he thus intruded himself upon my wife and my son.”

“I think so, too,” said Christian, the first words she had spoken.

Dr. Grey glanced at her sharply, but the most suspicious husband could have read nothing in her face beyond what she said.

“And I think,” burst in Miss Gascoigne, who had listened to it all, her large eyes growing every minute larger and larger, “that it must be somehow a lady’s own fault when a gentleman is intrusive, I never believed—­I never could have believed—­after all Dr. Grey has said about Sir Edwin, that the three figures—­a lady, and gentleman, and a child, whom I saw this afternoon sitting so comfortably together on the bench—­as comfortably, I vow and declare, as if they had been sitting there an hour, which perhaps they had—­”

“Not more than two minutes,” interrupted Christian, speaking very quietly, but conscious of a wild desire to fly at Miss Gascoigne and shake her as she stood, putting forward, in her customary way, those mangled fragments of truth which are more irritating than absolute lies.  “Indeed, it was only two minutes.  I did not choose, even if I had no other reason, that a man of whom Dr. Grey did not approve should hold any communication with Arthur?”

“Thank you, that was right,” said Dr. Greg.

“Yet you let him walk with you—­I know you did, up to the very Lodge door.”

“To the bridge, Miss Gascoigne.”

“Well, it’s all the same.  And I must confess it is most extraordinary conduct.  To refuse a gentleman’s visits—­his open visits here—­on the pretext that he is not good enough for your society, and then to meet him, sit with him, walk with him in the college grounds.  What will people say.”

Christian turned like a hunted creature at bay, “I do not care—­not a jot, what people say.”

“I thought not.  People like you never do care.  They fly in the face of society; they—­”

“Husband!” with a sort of wild appeal, the first she had ever made for protection—­for at least justice.

Dr. Grey looked up, started out of a long fit of thoughtfulness—­sadness it might be, during which he had let the conversation pass him by.

“The only thing I care for is what my husband thinks.  If he blames me—­”

“For what, my dear?”

“Because, when I was walking in the college grounds, as any lady may walk, that man, Sir Edwin Uniacke, whose acquaintance I desire as little as you do, came up and spoke to me, or rather to Arthur.  I could not help it, could I?”

“No, my child,” with a slight emphasis on the words “my child,” that went to Christian’s heart.  Yes, surely, if she had only had courage to tell him, in his large tenderness he could have understood that childish folly, the dream of a day, and the long misery it had brought her.  She would tell him all the very first opportunity; however much it pained and humiliated her, she would tell her good husband all.