"No doubt;—and I told Hugh; but not after the fashion in which he has told her. I blame myself mostly for this,—that we ever consented to come to this house. We had no business here. Who is to pay the rent?"
"Hugh insisted upon taking it."
"Yes;—and he will pay the rent; and we shall be a drag upon him, as though he had been fool enough to have a wife and a family of his own. And what good have we done? We had not strength enough to say that that wicked man should not see her when he came;—for he is a wicked man."
"If we had done that she would have been as bad then as she is now."
"Mother, we had no business to meddle either with her badness or her goodness. What had we to do with the wife of such a one as Mr. Trevelyan, or with any woman who was separated from her husband?"
"It was Hugh who thought we should be of service to them."
"Yes;—and I do not blame him. He is in a position to be of service to people. He can do work and earn money, and has a right to think and to speak. We have a right to think only for ourselves, and we should not have yielded to him. How are we to get back again out of this house to our cottage?"
"They are pulling the cottage down, Priscilla."
"To some other cottage, mother. Do you not feel while we are living here that we are pretending to be what we are not? After all, Aunt Stanbury was right, though it was not her business to meddle with us. We should never have come here. That poor woman now regards us as her bitter enemies."
"I meant to do for the best," said Mrs. Stanbury.