“What an annoyance!” muttered Jorge, looking out into the street.
“Dismiss her,” repeated Donna Felicidade.
When their guests had gone, Jorge said to Luiza,—
“What do you think of this? We must get rid of her. I don’t wish her to die in the house.”
Luiza, standing at the dressing-table, unfastening her hair, said, without looking at him, that they could not turn the poor woman out to die in the streets. She alluded to what she had done for Aunt Virginia. She let her words fall tentatively, like one walking on unstable ground. They might give her some money to go and live elsewhere.
Jorge, after a moment’s silence, said,—
“I have no objection to giving her ten or twelve pounds and letting her go. Let her arrange things to suit herself.”
“Ten or twelve pounds!” thought Luiza, in despair. And standing before her dressing-table she looked at herself in the glass with a vague wistfulness, as if she sought there her image as it must shortly be, stricken by grief, her eyes weary with weeping. For the crisis had at last come. If Jorge insisted on discharging this woman, she could not, without provoking a terrible explanation, say to him, “I do not wish her to go; I wish her to die here.” And Juliana, finding herself dismissed, desperate, sick, and seeing that Luiza did not interpose in her behalf, would take her revenge. What was to be done?
She arose in great agitation on the following day. Juliana had a great deal of oppression, and remained in bed. While Joanna set the table, Luiza, seated in an easy-chair at the dining-room window, was mechanically reading the “Diario de Noticias,” hardly comprehending what she read, when a notice at the head of the column gave her a slight shock:—
“To-morrow our friend the well-known banker, Senhor Castro, a partner in the house of Castro, Miranda, and Company, leaves Portugal for France. He retires from business in Lisbon to establish himself permanently in France, where he possesses a fine property in the neighborhood of Bordeaux.”