nt
hypocrisy. She allowed him to suppose that she did not hear, but spoke as
a party to the conversation. My aunt Dorothy blamed Julia. The squire
thundered at Heriot; Janet, liking both, contented herself with impartial
comments.

'I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,' she
said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and all
things in it. We rode over to Julia's cottage, on the outskirts of the
estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly bewitching
lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the captain was doing,
serving his country in foreign parts, while such as these were shining
without a captain at home. Janet approved his conduct, and was right.
'What can a wife think the man worth who sits down to guard his
house-door?' she answered my slight innuendo. She compared the man to a
kennel-dog. 'This,' said I, 'comes of made-up matches,' whereat she was
silent.

Julia took her own view of her position. She asked me whether it was not
dismal for one who was called a grass widow, and was in reality a
salt-water one, to keep fresh, with a lapdog, a cook, and a maid-servant,
and a postman that passed the gate twenty times for twice that he opened
it, and nothing to look for but this disappointing creature day after
day! At first she was shy, stole out a coy line of fingers to be shaken,
and lisped; and out of that mood came right-about-face, with an
exclamation of regret that she supposed she must not kiss me now. I
projected, she drew back. 'Shall Janet go?' said I. 'Then if nobody's
present I 'll be talked of,' said she, moaning queerly. The tendency of
her hair to creep loose of its bands gave her handsome face an aspect
deliriously wild. I complimented her on her keeping so fresh, in spite of
her salt-water widowhood. She turned the tables on me for looking so
powerful, though I was dying for a foreign princess.

'Oh! but that'll blow over,' she said; 'anything blows over as long as
you don't go up to the altar'; and she eyed her ringed finger, woebegone,
and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of her William.
Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she informed me,
staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built on a plot of ground
that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up, while the squire and the
other landowners of the neighbourhood were sleeping. 'And if you get
Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it'