“Lady Charlotte,” she said, “where are my wards?”
“They are my wards,” said Lady Charlotte no less haughtily.
“Excuse me, Lady Charlotte. Permit me,” said Mr. Grimes, with soothing gestures of his lean white hands.
“Please do not intervene,” said Aunt Phœbe.
“Mr. Grimes, madam, is my solicitor,” said Lady Charlotte. “You may go, Cashel.”
Cashel went reluctantly.
Mr. Grimes advanced a step and dandled his hands and smiled ingratiatingly. Italian and Spanish women will stab, he had heard, and fishwives are a violent class. Otherwise he believed all women, however terrible in appearance, to be harmless. This gave him courage.
“Miss Stubland, I believe,” he said. “These young people, young Stubland and his foster-sister to wit, are at present in my charge—under instructions from Lady Charlotte.”
“Where?” asked Aunt Phœbe.
“Our case, Miss Stubland, is that they were not being properly educated in your charge. That is our case. They were receiving no sound moral and religious training, and they were being brought up in—to say the least of it—an eccentric fashion. Our aim in taking them out of your charge is to secure for them a proper ordinary English bringing up.”