ng so inconceivably silly, and so
useless as to put herself in the power of Mrs. Potten. She would never,
never in all her life, do such a thing again. Another time, when hard up
and needing something necessary, she would borrow, or she would go
straight to the shop and order "the umbrella" (as after all, she had
done), and she would take the sporting chance of being able to pay the
bill some time. But never would she again touch notes or coins that
belonged to people she knew, and especially those belonging to Mrs.
Potten! Oh, what a wickedly cruel punishment she had to bear, merely
because she had had a sort of joke about ten shillings belonging to Mrs.
Potten.

One thing she would never forgive as long as she lived, and that was
Mrs. Potten's meanness. She would never forget the way in which Mrs.
Potten took advantage of her by getting her into Potten End alone, with
nobody to protect her.

First of all Mrs. Potten had pretended to be merely sorry. Then she
spoke about Mr. Harding and Mr. Bingham being witnesses and made the
whole thing appear as a sort of crime, and then she ended up with
saying: "The Warden must not be kept in ignorance of all this! That is
out of the question. He has a right to know." That came as an awful
shock to Gwendolen, and made her burst into tears.

"Are you afraid, child, he will break off the engagement?" was all that
Mrs. Potten said, and then the horrid old woman asked all sorts of
horrid questions, and wormed out all kinds of things: that the Warden
had not actually said he was in love, that he had scarcely spoken to her
for three days, and that he had not said "good-bye" that morning when he
left for London. How Mrs. Potten had managed to sneak it out of her
Gwendolen did not know, but Mrs. Potten gave her no time to think of
what she was saying, and being so much upset and so much afraid of Mrs.
Potten lots of things came out. And yet all the time she knew things
were going wrong because of the wicked look on Mrs. Potten's face.

However, Gwendolen had all through stuck to it (and it was the truth)
that she had never intended to do more than "sort of joke" with the
note, and this Mrs. Potten simply wouldn't understand. And when she,
Gwendolen, promised, on her honour, to make it "all right," by wiring to
her mother to send her a postal order for ten shillings by return, Mrs.
Potten sprang like a tiger on her: "Why wire for it? Why not return it
now?" Oh, the whole thing was awfu