Mrs. Brand watched her in bitter disappointment, then turned her face away and wept a few angry tears.
"Send for St. Udo," said she, curtly. "If he refuses your hand before my face, I shall change the will, but not unless he does so."
Margaret telegraphed to London for Captain Brand, telling him of his grandmother's sudden illness and her desire to see him.
Captain Brand wrote a polite and indifferent reply to Margaret Walsingham, expressing regrets, sympathy, and excuses, and promising to run down to Surrey some day next week.
Margaret wrote an entreating note, setting forth the urgency of the case and the certainty that Mrs. Brand was dying; and Captain Brand telegraphed a dry, "Very well, I will be at Regis to-night."
And all day long the dying woman sank lower, and forgot ere long the things of earth, and hour after hour went past, bringing only wilder grief and anxiety to the hapless Margaret.
So she was still tied to the wehr-wolf of her loathing fancy, and until St. Udo Brand chose to come to his grandmother that tie was indissoluble.
Margaret Walsingham was aroused from her hopeless meditations by the appearance of Symonds driving Mr. Davenport, Mrs. Brand's lawyer, into the court-yard, and she descended swiftly to meet him in the library.
Mr. Davenport entered—a tall, thin, wiry man, with beetling brows and irascible eyes—and cautiously shut the door.
"Is Mrs. Brand conscious yet?" he asked.