“Oh! I don’t know, my dear,” said Miss Winstanley, evasively. “I told you once before, I don’t know all about Arthur’s affairs. One, two, three—I am so afraid I have got a row too much—by-the-bye, my dear, I wish you wouldn’t talk so much about those Westerns. I warned you of it last year. Laurence does not like them, and the mention of them always irritates him.”
“It was Laurence himself who first mentioned them, as it happens,” said Alys, not too respectfully, it must be confessed.
“Ah, yes, but you said a great deal more, and, as I said last year—”
“Last year and this are very different, aunt,” said Alys. “Have you forgotten all that Mary Western did for me? No one has recognised it more fully than Laurence.”
“Ah, well, perhaps so. But still he does not like them. Did you not see how he made some excuse for going away, when you would go on talking about them?”
“It was no such thing. It was you fidgeting him about the fire when he was really concerned about Mr Western,” muttered Alys, but too low for her aunt to catch the words. And Miss Winstanley relapsed into her “one, two, three, four,” and for a few minutes there was silence. Then Alys returned to the charge.
“By what you said just now about Arthur’s uncertain circumstances, did you mean the peculiar terms of his father’s will?” she said, demurely.
“Oh, yes, of course, I suppose so, but I wish you would not ask me. I am very stupid about wills and all sorts of law things,” said Miss Winstanley, floundering about helplessly beneath her niece’s diplomatic cross-questioning. “I only meant that for a man who can’t marry and settle down it is an excellent thing to have some employment.”
“And why shouldn’t he marry and settle down?” said Alys. “He will come into his property in two years, when I am twenty-one—I always remember it by that—and till that he could have a good allowance to live on. Why shouldn’t he marry, poor fellow? I think it very hard lines that he shouldn’t.”
“But—” began Miss Winstanley.