“Do you think it will? I wish you to tell me what you think,” she added in a pointedly earnest tone.
“You should ask your husband for information, Maria. He must be far better able to give it to you than I.”
She remembered that George had told her she need not mention his having left Prior’s Ash until she saw Thomas Godolphin on Monday morning. Therefore she did not reply to Isaac that she could not ask George because he was absent. “Isaac, I wish you to tell me,” she gravely rejoined. “Anything you know, or may think.”
“I really know very little, Maria. Nothing, in fact, for certain. Prior’s Ash is saying that the Bank will not open again. The report is that some message of an unfavourable nature was telegraphed down last night by Mr. Godolphin.”
“Telegraphed to whom?” she asked eagerly.
“To Hurde. I cannot say whether there’s any foundation for it. Old Hurde’s as close as wax. No fear of his spreading it, if it has come; unless it lay in his business to do so. I walked out of church with him, but he did not say a syllable about it to me.”
Maria sat a few minutes in silence. “If the Bank should not go on, Isaac—what then?”
“Why—then, of course it would not go on,” was the very logical answer returned by Mr. Isaac.
“But what would be done, Isaac? How would it end?”
“Well—I suppose there’d be an official winding-up of affairs. Perhaps the Bank might be reopened afterwards on a smaller scale. I don’t know.”