A Fair Fraud — page 62: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

A Fair Fraud 51 struck with her. This might make some mothers in my place uneasy, but Mrs Lane has been so outspoken and frank about it to me that I have no anxieties whatever.’ ‘Indeed?’ Marion dipped her pen once more in the ink. ‘Look at that woman’s devotion to her duty! Why, she assures me that she never leaves her daughter alone with a marriageable man on any pretext whatever! That is why, of course, she has learnt to do these things—to skate and to bicycle, and so on, in order constantly to accompany her child, and chaperone her. I call it great devotion on her part, and I must say that I have formed a much higher opinion of Mrs Lane since she has told me this. It is not for her own pleasure, but to be always with Hester, that she has learnt to join her in everything she does. If I had had a daughter, Marion, I should never have let her out of my sight !’ Marion answered nothing, but she could not help remembering that, coming home from a long drive with her aunt only the previous afternoon, she had distinctly seen, up a side road, Kenneth Drury and Miss Lane cycling side by side, and a faint speck in the far dis- tance behind them, which she had taken to be the careful chaperone. She had supposed that this was their general method of riding—for a GOMMGIOO