‘No, I’ll do that,’ said Mervyn. ‘It is all my doing.’
‘Run after him, Phœbe,’ said Honor. ‘Don’t let Bertha think it settled!’
And Bertha was, of course, disappointingly indifferent.
Lady Bannerman’s nature was not capable of great surprise, but Miss Charlecote’s proposal was not unwelcome. ‘I did not want to go,’ she said; ‘though dear Sir Nicholas would have made any sacrifice, and it would have looked so for them to have gone alone. Travelling with an invalid is so trying, and Phœbe made such a rout about Maria, that Mr. Crabbe insisted on her going. But you like the kind of thing.’
Honor undertook for her own taste for the kind of thing, and her ladyship continued, ‘Yes, you must find it uncommonly dull to be so much alone. Where did Juliana tell me she had heard of Lucy Sandbrook?’
‘She is in Staffordshire,’ answered Honor, gravely.
‘Ah, yes, with Mrs. Willis Beaumont; I remember. Juliana made a point of letting her know all about it, and how you were obliged to give her up.’
‘I hope not,’ exclaimed Honor, alarmed. ‘I never gave her up! There is no cause but her own spirit of independence that she should not return to me to-morrow.’
‘Oh, indeed,’ said Augusta, carelessly letting the subject drop, after having implanted anxiety too painful to be quelled by the hope that Lady Acton’s neighbourhood might have learnt how to rate her words.
Mr. Crabbe was satisfied and complimentary; Robert, rejoiced and grateful; and Bertha, for the first time, set her will upon recovering, and made daily experiments on her strength, thus quickly amending, though still her weakness and petulance needed the tenderest management, and once when a doubt arose as to Miss Charlecote’s being able to leave home, she suddenly withered up again, with such a recurrence of unfavourable symptoms as proved how precarious was her state.