Edith went up to her mother, and said in a low voice, “May I tell him?”
Evidently it cost Lady Louvaine some pain to say “Yes,” yet she said it. Edith went back to her seat.
“Aubrey,” she said, “four-and-twenty years gone, thine uncle, my brother Walter, was what thou art now, in the very same office and household. His wages were then sixteen pound by the year—”
“But mine are thirty-five, Aunt,” responded Aubrey quickly, as though he guessed what she was about to say.
“In order to be like every one else, Aubrey, and not come in bad odour with his fellows, he spent well-nigh four hundred pound by the year, and—”
“Uncle Walter!” cried Aubrey in amazement, and Lettice could have been his echo.
“Ay!” said Edith, sadly. “And for over ten years thereafter was my father so crippled with his debts, that I mind it being a fine treat when I and my sisters had a new gown apiece, though of the commonest serge, and all but bare necessaries were cut off from our board. Walter laid it so to heart that of a spendthrift he became a miser. I would not have thee so to do, but I bid thee mind that we have very little to live on, owing all we yet have, and have brought withal, to the goodness of my dear Aunt Joyce; and if thou fall in such ways, Aubrey—”
“Dear heart, Aunt! Think you I have no wit?”
“Thou hast not an ill wit, my lad,” said Aunt Temperance, “if a wise man had the keeping of it.”
“Temperance, you are so unfeeling!” exclaimed Faith. “Must I needs stand up for my fatherless boy?”