h it, her terrors subsided; and
I thought this the right moment to deliver a stroke that I had been
holding in reserve.

"You know," I began, "the Bentleys have their summer place there--the
old Bentley homestead. It's their ancestral town, you know."

"Bentleys? What Bentleys?" she demanded, opaquely.

"Why, those people we met on the _Corinthian_, summer before last--you
thought he was in love with the girl--"

A simultaneous photograph could alone reproduce Mrs. March's tumultuous
and various emotions as she seized the fact conveyed in my words. She
poured out a volume of mingled conjectures, assertions, suspicions,
conclusions, in which there was nothing final but the decision that we
must not dream of going there; that it would look like thrusting
ourselves in, and would be in the worst sort of taste; they would all
hate us, and we should feel that we were spies upon the young people;
for of course the Bentleys had got Glendenning there to marry him, and
in effect did not want any one to witness the disgraceful spectacle.

I said, "That may be the nefarious purpose of the young lady, but, as I
understood Glendenning, it is no part of her mother's design."

"What do you mean?"

"Miss Bentley may have got him there to marry him, but Mrs. Bentley
seems to have meant nothing more than an engagement at the worst."

"What _do_ you mean? They're not engaged, are they?"

"They're not married, at any rate, and I suppose they're engaged. I did
not have it from Miss Bentley, but I suppose Glendenning may be trusted
in such a case."

"Now," said my wife, with a severity that might well have appalled me,
"if you will please to explain, Basil, it will be better for you."

"Why, it is simply this. Glendenning seems to have made himself so
useful to the mother and pleasing to the daughter after we left them in
Montreal that he was tolerated on a pretence that there was reason for
his writing back to Mrs. Bentley after he got home, and, as Mrs. Bentley
never writes letters, Miss Bentley had the hard task of answering him.
This led to a correspondence."

"And to her moving heaven and earth to get him to Gormanville. I see! Of
course she did it so that no one knew what she was about!"

"Apparently. Glendenning himself was not in the secret. The Bentleys
were in Europe last summer, and he did not know that they had a place at
Gormanville till he came to live there. Another proof that Miss Bentley
got him there is the fa