As the lawyer, in dry calculated sentences, explained the details and conditions of the little legacy, Mrs. Barbour broke down and wept after the fashion of her class, with great whoops, and holding her housekeeping apron to her eyes. All her little world seemed to be crumbling. She was not, by nature, an impressionable woman, but had it been her lot, as it is the lot of so many of her kind, to hear, month by month, new footsteps echo on her stairs; to see, month by month, strange faces people her rooms, the dignity of proprietorship, the sense of being mistress of a home, which had done so much to soften and sweeten her, must have missed her altogether, and the wear and tear upon her perceptions vulgarized her heart far quicker than feet or hands shabbied her house. During fifteen years, as far as Lady Anne was concerned, without the slightest temptation to anything that could be construed as a "liberty," or a single soul-searching as regards her own equivocal social status, the service of love had, little by little, been substituting itself for the service of gain. Custom and habit are strong with all who have attained middle life, but with women, after a certain age is reached, they are tyrants. Nor was it in its monetary aspect chiefly, though that might well have given her pause, that the sense of bereavement reached her. Simple words are most convincing. She was wondering how, "if anything should happen," poor Lady Anne in the nursing home, to which she was evidently bound, she could ever find the heart to wait upon strangers in her rooms.
"——five hundred pounds, until the age of twenty-one, unless upon an occasion of urgent necessity, the nature of which shall be determined by said trustees, appointed on the one part by the said Honorable Mrs. Nigel Kedo Barbour——"
"Boo-hoo!" wept the honorable lady.
The invalid patted her upon the shoulder. "My dear, good friend, do control yourself!"
"Oh, I can't, I can't! Oh! I never shall stop in this house. It won't be the same to me."
The broken phrases struggled through her tears like bubbles through water. The lawyer had to stop.
"I suppose," Lady Anne said, after the faithful Druce had led her weeping mistress away, "that class doesn't really know what their ideas are until they've put them into words. They say a lot over, and then pick out the ones they want to keep. Oh, I shall be glad when it's over one way or another, Windy. I think I know now how poor Uncle Eustace must have felt the day before Major Hartnett shot him. There's not much difference between a duel and an operation."
Thus it was to a house cold and dark with the shadow of change and worse that Fenella came home. Mercifully she was spared questioning on her own pale cheeks and dull eyes. Mrs. Barbour was in no mood to be entertained with a description of her doings among the fine folk. Lady Anne was dozing when she arrived, and might not be disturbed. The poor lady was already invested with something of her perilous state. A nurse in a blue linen dress and goffered cap, whose lightest word was law, moved softly up and down stairs in felt ward slippers, carrying various mysterious burdens. She called Fenella at about midnight. The girl had taken off her outer garments and put on a fleecy dressing-gown.
"You must be very quiet," Nurse Adelaide said, "and not stay more than half an hour. I want her to settle for the night while she is out of pain."