“What—Aunt Ellen?”
“Yes. Your father, though well aware that she was respectably connected and well-conducted, concealed the fact, so that your grandfather, under a false impression, made his will in George’s favour,—in your father’s favour. Do you understand?”
Kate’s answer was unexpected.
“Mother,—how do you know?” she said abruptly, with a sort of instinctive defiance.
“Because after your grandfather’s sudden death, James accused my husband of having received an explanatory letter to lay before his father. I found that letter and read it.”
“Did you ask him?”
“No, Kate, he and his brother were beyond the reach of questions then. Now you know why Kingsworth is hateful to me, and why I have no pleasure in any of the advantages it brings you.”
Poor Kate was stunned and startled, conscious chiefly of the instinctive effort to check a flood of tears.
“But Uncle James was a wicked man,” she said vehemently.
“How does that alter it? Let him have been ever so wicked or ever so weak, he was wronged, he and his child, by your father.”