"No; I haven't got his letter."
"Did he admit that--that mamma had done this?"
Fanny hesitated: but her intelligence, which was of a simple kind, did not suggest to her an ingenious line of reply.
"Well, I dare say he didn't. But that doesn't make any difference."
"Was that what he and Uncle Merton quarrelled about?"
Fanny hesitated again; then broke out: "Father only did what he ought--he asked for what was owed mother!"
"And papa wouldn't give it!" cried Diana, in a strange note of scorn; "papa, who never could rest if he owed a farthing to anybody--who always overpaid everybody--whom everybody--"
She rose suddenly with a bitten lip. Her eyes blazed--and her cheeks. She walked to the window and stood looking out, in a whirlwind of feeling and memory, hiding her face as best she could from the girl who sat watching her with an expression half sulky, half insolent. Diana was thinking of moments--recalling forgotten fragments of dialogue--in the past, which showed her father's opinion of his Barbadoes brother-in-law: "A grasping, ill-bred fellow"--"neither gratitude, nor delicacy"--"has been the evil genius of his wife, and will be the ruin of his children." She did not believe a word of Fanny's story--not a word of it!