"What? We're ruined! If there's fifty pounds in the bank it's all, and only that between us and nothing."
"My God!" exclaimed mamma, whiter than ever, and almost in a whisper.
"Your God! What are you talking about? It is you that have done it all—filling the house with priests and Jesuits. I knew how it would be, you fool!"
Papa was speaking with the sternness of actual fury.
"I'm not to blame—it is not my doing. Frank, for Heaven's sake, don't speak so—you'll drive me mad! I don't know what they have done—I don't understand it!" cried mamma, and burst into a helpless flood of tears.
"You may as well stop that crying—you can do it in the streets by-and-by. Understand it? By Heaven, you'll understand it well enough before long. I hope you may, as you deserve it!"
With those dreadful looks, and a voice hoarse with passion, poor papa strode out of the room, and we heard him shut the hall-door after him with a crash.
We were left with the vaguest ideas of the nature of our misfortune; his agitation was so great as to assure me that an alarming calamity had really befallen us. Mamma cried on. She was frightened by his evident alarm, and outraged by his violence, so shocking in one usually so gay, gentle, and serene. She went up to her room to cry there, and to declare herself the most miserable of women. Her maid gave her sal-volatile, and I, seeing no good or comfort in my presence, ran down to the drawing-room. I had hardly got into the room, when whom should I see arriving at the door in a cab, with some papers in his hand, but Mr. Forrester, papa's principal attorney. I knew papa was out, and I was so afraid of his attorney's going away without giving us any light on the subject of our alarms that I ran downstairs, and told the servant to show him into the dining-room, and on no account to let him go away. I went into the room myself, and there awaited him. In came Mr. Forrester, and looked surprised at finding me only.
"Oh! Mr. Forrester," I said, going quickly to him, and looking up in his eyes, "what is this about Lady Lorrimer, and—are we quite ruined?"
"Ruined?" he repeated. "Oh, dear, not at all," and he threw a cautionary glance towards the door, and lowered his voice a little. "Why should you be ruined? It's only a disappointment. It has been very artfully done, and I was only this moment at the Temple talking the will over with one of the best men at the Bar, to whom I'm to send a brief, though I can't see, myself, any good that is likely to come of it. Everything has been done, you see, under the best possible advice, and all the statutes steered clear of. Her estates were all turned into money—that is, the reversions sold—two years ago. The whole thing is very nearly a quarter of a million, all in money, and the will declares no trust—a simple bequest. I haven't the slightest hope of any case on the ground of undue influence. I daresay she was, in the meaning of the law, a perfectly free agent; and if she was not, depend upon it we shall never find it out."