“Hold your sauce, girl! How dare you bring your mistress’s name up in any such thing? I don’t know what you mean, for my part. When she complains of her husband, it will be time enough then for you to join in the chorus. Could you wish to see a better husband, pray?”
“He is quite a model husband to her face,” replied saucy Harriet. “And the old saying’s a true one: What the eye don’t see, the heart won’t grieve. Where’s the need for us to quarrel over it?” she added, taking up her work again. “You have your opinion and I have mine, and if they were laid side by side, it’s likely they’d not be far apart from each other. But let them be bad or good, it can’t change the past. What’s done, is done: and the house is broken up.”
Margery flung off her shawl just as Charlotte Pain had flung off hers the previous Monday morning in the breakfast-room, and a silence ensued.
“Perhaps the house may go on again?” said Margery, presently, in a dreamy tone.
“Why, how can it?” returned Harriet, looking up from her work at the pinafore, which she had resumed. “All the money’s gone. A bank can’t go on without money.”
“What does he say to it?” very sharply asked Margery.
“What does who say to it?”
“Master. Does he say how the money comes to be gone? How does he like facing the creditors?”
“He is not here,” said Harriet. “He has not been home since he left last Saturday. It’s said he is in London.”
“And Mr. Godolphin?”