Henrietta was weeping softly behind the handkerchief she held at her eyes. At last she repeated:
"You say he left you in his widow's charge?"
"Yes, madam."
"Left his widow in yours, rather, you good and faithful sister."
"It was the same thing, lady; we were to live together, and to support each other."
"But what was your thought, my dear girl, in bringing her here?"
"I told you, lady, that in her own native land, among her own kinsfolk, she might be comforted, and might resume her girlhood's thoughts and habits, and learn to forget the strange, dark passages of her short married life, passed in a foreign country."
"But, my dear girl, did you not know, had you never heard that her uncle disowned her for marrying against his will?"
"Something of that I certainly heard from Edith, lady, when I first proposed to her to come home. But she was very weak, and her thoughts very rambling, poor thing—she could not stick to a point long, and I overruled and guided her—I could not believe but that her friends would take her poor widowed heart to their homes again. But if it should be otherwise, still—"
"Well?—still?"