“I have not denied it; but I cannot stand and discuss it as if it were anything else. I am only human. I must go. I am afraid of—of meeting them. Tell me, is this the right way?”
“Yes,” replied Lettice mechanically; “straight on brings you out on the road again. It is a short cut.”
Philip raised his hat; and before Lettice had time for another word, had she indeed known what to say, he was gone. She stood and looked after him for some moments with a blank, half-scared expression; and then, retracing her steps, she walked slowly back, and thus came to be observed by her sister and Godfrey returning in the other direction.
It was not a happy moment for Mr Auriol to choose for his renewed attempt. Lettice slept badly, and woke in the morning feverish and excited; but, by way perhaps of shifting the misgiving and self-reproach which would insinuate themselves, more blindly determined than ever to stand to her colours. She listened to her uncle’s letter and to all Mr Auriol had to say, and then quietly announced her decision. Nothing could induce her to regard as a relation the man who had supplanted her father, the representative of the unnatural family who had treated him all his life long as a pariah and an outcast, and had been the cause of sorrows and trials without end to him and her mother.
“I am the eldest,” she said. “I can remember more distinctly than the others the privations and trials they went through—at the very time when my father’s father and brother were rolling in riches, some part of which surely, by every natural law, should have been his.”
“And some part of which was his,” said Godfrey. “Everything he had came from his father. And why it was not more was his own fault. He would not take it.”
“Neither will I,” said Lettice, crimsoning. “What my father accepted and left to us I considers ours; but I will take no more in any shape, directly or indirectly.”
“Then,” said Godfrey, also losing his self-control, “you had better give up all you have. For, is surely as I stand here, you would not, as I have already explained to you, have had one farthing left but for what Ingram Morison did and risked. You owe all to him.”
Lettice turned upon him, very pale now.
“You may some day repent taunting me so cruelly with what I am in no way responsible for,” she said.