"And if she asks--for her wages--tell her--I say there's nothing due--under the circumstances."
"All right, Auntie," Edwin agreed, desperate.
Maggie, followed by Clara, softly entered the room. Auntie Hamps glanced at them with a certain cautious suspicion, as though one or other of them was capable of thwarting her in the matter of Minnie. Then her eyes closed, and Edwin was aware of a slackening of her hold on his hand. The doctor, who called half an hour later, said that she might never speak again, and she never did. Her last conscious moments were moments of satisfaction.
Edwin slowly released his hand.
"Where's Albert?" he asked Clara, merely for the sake of saying something.
"He's taking the children home, and then he's going to the works. He ought to have gone long ago. There's a dreadful upset there."
"I suppose there is," said Edwin, who had forgotten that the fly-wheel accident must have almost brought Albert's manufactory to a standstill. And he wondered whether it was the family instinct, or anxiety about Auntie Hamps's will, that had caused Albert to absent himself from business on such a critical morning.
"I ought to go too," he muttered, as a full picture of a lithographic establishment masterless swept into his mind.
"Have you telegraphed to Hilda?" Clara demanded.
"No."