"Begging?"
"Yes; begging. It's a question whether she's left with enough to live upon. I'm sure we have none to spare, for her or for anybody else; and so I shall plainly tell her if she attempts to ask."
That they had none to spare, was an indisputable fact. Mrs. Arkell had done all in her power to hurry the marriage on with Miss Fauntleroy, but Travice held back unpardonably. His cheek grew bright with hectic, his whole time was spent in what his mother called "moping;" and he entered but upon rare occasions the house of his bride elect. Mr. Arkell would not urge him by a single word; but, in the delay, he had had to sacrifice another remnant of his property.
The first use that Mrs. Dundyke put her carriage to in Westerbury, was that of going in it to William Arkell's. Mildred declined to accompany her, and Lucy was obliged to go with her; Lucy, who would have given the whole world not to go. But she could not say so.
Mrs. Arkell was in the dining-room, when the carriage drove in at the court-yard gates. She wondered whose it was. A nice close carriage, the servants attending it in mourning. She did not recognise it as one she knew.
She heard the visitors shown into the drawing-room, and waited for the cards with some curiosity. But no cards came in. Mrs. Dundyke, the servant brought word, and she was with Miss Lucy Arkell.
Mrs. Dundyke! Wondering what on earth brought Betsey in that carriage, and where she had picked it up, Mrs. Arkell took a closer view of it through the window. It was too good a carriage to be anything but a private one, and those horses were never hired; and there were the servants. She looked at the crest. But it was not a crest. Only an enclosed cipher, D.D.
It did not lessen her curiosity, and she went to the drawing-room, wondering still; but she never once glanced at the possibility that it could be Mrs. Dundyke's; the thought occurred to her that it must belong to some member of the Dewsbury family, and had been lent to Mildred.
It was a stiff meeting. Mrs. Arkell, fully imbued with the persuasion that her sister was left badly off, that she was the same poor sister of other days, was less cordial than she might have been. She shook hands with her sister; she shook hands with Lucy; but in her manner there was a restraint that told. They spoke of general subjects, of Mr. Dundyke's strange adventure in Switzerland, and his subsequent real death; of Lucy's sojourn in London; of Charlotte's recent marriage; of the departure of Sophy with her for India—just, in fact, as might have been the case with ordinary guests.
"Travice is soon to be married, I hear," said Mrs. Dundyke.