“I do not know what she means to do,” answered Maria, shaking her head. “She protests ten times a day that she will not go; but I see she is carefully mending up all her cotton gowns, and one day I heard her say to Meta that she supposed nothing but cotton was bearable out there. What I should do without Margery on the voyage I don’t like to think about. George told her to consider of it, and give us her decision when he next came down. And you, Janet? When shall you be back again at Prior’s Ash?”
“I do not suppose I shall ever come back to it,” was Janet’s answer. “Its reminiscences will not be so pleasing to me that I should seek to renew my acquaintance with it.”
“Bexley attends you, I hear.”
“Yes. My aunt’s old servant has got beyond his work—he has been forty-two years in the family, Maria—and Bexley will replace him.”
When Janet rose to leave, she bent over Maria and slipped four sovereigns into her hand. “It is for yourself, my dear,” she whispered.
“Oh, thank you! But indeed I have enough, Janet. George left me five pounds when he was at home, and it is not half gone. You don’t know what a little keeps us. I eat next to nothing, and Margery, I think, lives chiefly upon porridge: there’s only Meta.”
“But you ought to eat, child!”
“I can’t eat,” said Maria. “I have never lost that pain in my throat.”
“What pain?” asked Janet.
“I do not know. It came on with the trouble. I feel—I feel always ill within myself, Janet. I seem to be always shivering inwardly; and the pain in the throat is sometimes better, sometimes worse, but it never quite goes away.”