Miss Grantham swallowed, blushed, and said in a small-girl voice: “To teach him a lesson!”
Lady Bellingham sank back again. “But what is the use of teaching people lessons? Besides, I cannot conceive what he is to learn from such behaviour! I do hope, my dearest love, that you have not got a touch of the sun! I do not know how you can be so odd!”
“Well, it is to punish him,” said Miss Grantham, goaded. “He will not like it at all when he hears that Adrian is going to marry me. I dare say he will try to do something quite desperate.”
“Offer you more money?” asked Lady Bellingham, once more reviving.
“If he offered me a hundred thousand pounds I would fling it in his face!” declared Miss Grantham.
“Deb,” said her aunt earnestly, “it is sacrilege to talk like that! What—what, you unnatural girl, is to become of me? Only remember that odious bill from Priddy’s, and the wheatstraw, and the new barouche!”
“I know, Aunt Lizzie,” said Deborah, conscience-stricken. “But indeed I could not!”
“You will have to marry Mablethorpe,” said Lady Bellingham despairingly.
“No, I won’t’
“My head goes round and round!” complained her aunt, pressing a hand to her brow. “First you say that Ravenscar will be sorry when he hears you are to marry Mablethorpe, and now you say you won’t marry him!”