“Oh, yes! of course. You know I write her all that.”
“It seems to say more when it is spoken! And remember, if you need me, that I am there”; and Mrs. Penniman glanced at the third floor.
On this they separated, and Morris, left to himself, stood looking at the house a moment; after which he turned away, and took a gloomy walk round the Square, on the opposite side, close to the wooden fence. Then he came back, and paused for a minute in front of Dr. Sloper’s dwelling. His eyes travelled over it; they even rested on the ruddy windows of Mrs. Penniman’s apartment. He thought it a devilish comfortable house.
XVII
Mrs. Penniman told Catherine that evening—the two ladies were sitting in the back parlour—that she had had an interview with Morris Townsend; and on receiving this news the girl started with a sense of pain. She felt angry for the moment; it was almost the first time she had ever felt angry. It seemed to her that her aunt was meddlesome; and from this came a vague apprehension that she would spoil something.
“I don’t see why you should have seen him. I don’t think it was right,” Catherine said.
“I was so sorry for him—it seemed to me some one ought to see him.”
“No one but I,” said Catherine, who felt as if she were making the most presumptuous speech of her life, and yet at the same time had an instinct that she was right in doing so.
“But you wouldn’t, my dear,” Aunt Lavinia rejoined; “and I didn’t know what might have become of him.”
“I have not seen him, because my father has forbidden it,” Catherine said very simply.