Indiscretion by Jude Morgan

been a fixed delusion that if she threw back her head and laughed at the ceiling with her eyes closed she rendered herself instantly more attractive to the opposite sex. Plainly Mrs Catling, who questioned the footman for twenty minutes on exactly how the callers had looked on being told she was not at home, when it came to her nephew and niece, was as mad as Ajax.
    Caroline herself was, of course, the exception that proved this interesting rule, being all rationality.
    The meeting came at last — the next morning, when Caroline was accompanying Mrs Catling on her usual promenade along the Steyne, and being treated to the usual scurrilous information on every passer-by. A man’s voice cried, ‘Aunt! Aunt Sophia!’ from some distance behind them.
    ‘And now this woman on our left, with the crown of curls, is actually as bald as an egg —’
    ‘Ma’am,’ Caroline interrupted her, ‘someone is calling you — surely Mr Downey’ She turned to look back, but was steered firmly round by Mrs Catling, who could hear perfectly well, and was determined on a last triumph of making her relatives run after her, and get out of breath, and be generally at a disadvantage.
    So they were: Mr Matthew Downey, and Miss Maria Downey, stood panting before them, he that same dark and stocky young man Caroline had encountered in the hall at Dover Street, she a golden-fair, long-limbed, languorous sylph of a girl, who looked as if she strongly disliked running, now or ever.
    ‘Matthew — Maria — how d’you do, my dears? We are blessed by the weather again, are we not? Though I do smell a shower in the wind,’ Mrs Catling said, with provoking blandness; and gathering Caroline’s arm tightly to her, ‘This is Miss Caroline Fortune, my new companion — I say new, though we are so wonderfully used to each other, and so entirely in each other’s confidence, that I feel as if I have known her all my life! My dear, what are you thinking? Pray put up your parasol — you’ll spoil that beautiful skin.’
    This mark of affectionate attention was so utterly unlike Mrs Catling that Caroline could not have been more surprised if her employer had got down upon all fours and invited her to a game of Gee-Up Dobbin. But it succeeded in its chief aim. Mr Matthew Downey, at least, looked thoroughly put out: he could manage only stiff civility as the introductions were made.
    ‘But, Aunt,’ he went on impatiently, ‘you must know we have tried to call upon you. And you never at home — we were quite concerned —’
    ‘Were you?’ Mrs Catling said, smiling, with a tremendous question mark. ‘Why? Did you suppose the servants had murdered me, and were concealing the fact? But, my dear Matthew, you forget yourself — here is a gentleman unintroduced.’
    This was a tall, fine-figured man who had been accompanying the Downeys, and who, having declined altogether to break into a run, only now came up with them. He was dressed with negligent elegance, his coat fashionably tight across his broad shoulders, but not so that it would require two strong men and a winch to get him out of it: his cravat tied with careful carelessness, seals at his waist, his patent boots dazzling. He was about thirty, and in his aquiline good looks the best qualities of youth and maturity stood in such striking balance that Caroline turned a little dry-mouthed at the sight. His smile, though, completed him: it had the right dash of self-mockery in it, and seemed to contradict Caroline’s inward proviso that a man so handsome must be very stupid.
    ‘This is Mr Leabrook,’ Matthew said, impatient as before. ‘We met on the coach, and came down to Brighton together, and so we became a sort of friends. Oh, hang it — ’ as Mrs Catling’s satirical eyebrows rose ‘ — I don’t mean it to sound so — only it was you we came to see, Aunt, as you well know.’
    ‘I am flattered,’ Mrs Catling said, ‘and now you see me, and you might, my dear Matthew, be a little