"Your Lordship will, I am sure, feel that, in making some little provision for Miss Gray, you will be doing what Lady Anne wished and intended to do," Mr. Buckton said earnestly, turning from the lady to her husband.
Lord Iniscrone's eyes fluttered nervously. He was not a bad little man at heart, but he was entirely ruled by his wife.
"I don't think the estate will bear it, Mr. Buckton," he said in a peevish voice. "It is heavily burdened as it is. If a five-pound note would be of any use——"
"I can't see that we are called upon to do anything, Jarvis," his wife put in again. "In fact, Mr. Buckton, you may take it that we do not intend to do anything more for Miss Gray."
"Very well, Lady Iniscrone."
Mr. Buckton turned away and busied himself with his papers. He could not trust himself at the moment to speak lest he should forget his professional discretion.
But Mary had not waited for the result of his intercession on her behalf, of which, indeed, she knew nothing. Mary, who was sensitive to every breath of praise and blame, had fled out of the dear house, the atmosphere of which had become suddenly unfriendly. A good many friends would have been glad to have had her. Lady Agatha Chenevix was away, else she would have been by her friend's side to take her part with passionate generosity and indignation. She was away, but Jessie Baynes's little house on the edge of the sea, a bare little homely place, full of sunlight and the sea-wind, had its doors open to her. One could not imagine a better place for a sad and sorrowful heart than Jessie's little spare room, with its balcony opening like the deck of a ship on to the blue floor of the sea. Mildred Carruthers had come at once, in the first hour of the girl's grief, to carry her off to the big house, which was now amply justified by the size of the doctor's practice.
Only, where would Mary go to but home? In all those years in the great house on the Mall she had never come to find Wistaria Terrace too little and lowly for her. Indeed, there was a wonderful wholesomeness and sweetness to her mind about the little house. The transfiguring mists of her love lay rosily over even the drudgery of her childish days. To be sure, there had been hard work and short commons. She had been insufficiently clad in winter, too heavily clad in summer. Her people had gone without fires and many other things which some would have considered essential. But there had always been love. Looking back on those days, Mary saw with the eyes of the spirit which miss out immaterial material things.
She fled back home. She took nothing with her but what she stood up in. Only her friend, Simmons, while Lady Iniscrone was absent from the house, packed up all Mary's belongings, and conveyed them, with the assistance of the coachman, across the lane to Wistaria Terrace. The servants had made up their minds that Mary was not coming back.
Lady Iniscrone had hoped, in conversation with Lord Iniscrone, that Mary would not give them any trouble. Never was anyone less inclined to give trouble than Mary. Not for worlds would she have gone back to the house where the new cold rule was, to meet Lady Iniscrone's unfriendly eyes. Only while the body of her benefactress was yet above ground she had stolen across at quiet hours, in the absence of the enemy, to look for the last time on the quiet face. She had carried away little Fifine. Fifine was seventeen years old now, and shook incessantly and moaned in a lost way in her darkness. But she knew Mary's voice. Mary was the one that could comfort her. At Wistaria Terrace they went to the unheard-of extravagance of having a fire in Mary's room, day after day, so that Fifine might lie before it in a basket, and feel the warmth in her little bones, and hear Mary's voice.