The good lady was silent a moment. "To me," she replied. "And to you as well."
"Then they mustn't come back."
"That will be a greater worry still."
"Surely not a greater—a smaller. We'll put up with the lesser evil."
"Nothing will prevent her coming to a sense, eventually, of what might have been. And when they both recognize it——"
"It will be very dreadful!" Hugh exclaimed, completing gaily his mother's phrase. "I don't see, however," he added, "what in all this you do with Bessie Whiteroy."
"Oh, he'll be tired of her; she's hard, she'll have become despotic. I see life as it is," the good lady repeated.
"Then all I can say is that it's not very nice! But they sha'n't come back: I'll attend to that!" said Hugh Gosselin, who has attended to it up to this time successfully, though the rest of his mother's prophecy is so far accomplished (it was her second hit) as that Charlotte Firminger is now, strange as it may seem, Lady Beaupré.
[THE VISITS]
The other day, after her death, when they were discussing her, someone said in reference to the great number of years she had lived, the people she had seen and the stories she knew: "What a pity no one ever took any notes of her talk!" For a London epitaph that was almost exhaustive, and the subject presently changed. One of the listeners had taken many notes, but he didn't confess it on the spot. The following story is a specimen of my exactitude—I took it down, verbatim, having that faculty, the day after I heard it. I choose it, at hazard, among those of her reminiscences that I have preserved; it's not worse than the others. I will give you some of the others too—when occasion offers—so that you may judge.