“I am very sure he did not. But what is to be done?”
“Done, my dear?” repeated her ladyship. “Well, I think you should write him a pretty letter, thanking him for his goodness in restoring my bills. I must say it is most obliging of him! I never supposed that he would do so, for they say he is abominably close! But I shall tell anyone who says that to me again that it is not so at all!”
Miss Grantham pressed her hands to her cheeks. “My dear ma’am, you cannot think that I would accept this generosity! It is impossible! What am I to do?”
Lady Bellingham’s eyes started with horror. She caught up the packet and clasped it to her bosom. “Not accept it?” she gasped. “After all the trouble you have been to get these horrid things away from him? Oh, I shall go mad!”
“But that was different,” Miss Grantham said impatiently. “I never thought he would give them to me merely for the asking!”
“But, my love; you were trying to take them from him by force!” wailed her ladyship.
“Yes, and so I would have,” agreed Miss Grantham. “But to be beholden to him in this manner is intolerable!”
“Deb, they are my bills, and I don’t find it intolerable!” said her ladyship in imploring tones.
“It puts me in the most odious position! I can never lift my head again! Besides, he does not even like me! You must see, ma’am, that I cannot endure this! It is not as though I had behaved nicely to him: I have done everything I could to make him hate and despise me!”
“Yes, my love, indeed you have, and that is what makes it so particularly obliging of him! I daresay he must think you are mad, and that is why he has done it, because, he is sorry for you.”