“I am tired of the country,” said Mrs Winterbourn; “but I am also tired of everything else, so that does not matter much. Lady Markham, I have come to tell you a great piece of news. My trustee and Mr Winterbourn’s executor, who has been at the other end of the world, has come home.”
“Yes, Nelly?” Lady Markham’s look of alarm grew more and more marked. “You make me very anxious,” she cried. “I am sure something has happened that you did not foresee.”
“Oh, nothing has happened—that I ought not to have foreseen. I always wondered why Sarah Winterbourn stuck to me so. The will has been opened and read, and I know how it all is now. I rushed to tell you, as you have been so kind.”
“Dear Nelly!” Lady Markham said, not knowing, in the growing perturbation of her mind, what else to say.
“Mr Winterbourn has been very liberal to me. He has left me everything he can leave away from his heir-at-law. Nothing that is entailed, of course; but there is not very much under the entail. They tell me I will be one of the richest women—a wealthy widow.”
“My dear Nelly, I am so very glad; but I am not surprised. Mr Winterbourn had a great sense of justice. He could not do less for you than that.”
“But Lady Markham, you have not heard all.” It was not like Nelly Winterbourn to speak in such measured tones. There was not the faintest sign of the espiègle in her voice. Frances, roused by the astonished, alarmed look in her mother’s face, drew a little nearer almost involuntarily, notwithstanding her abstraction in anxieties of her own.
“Nelly, do you mind Frances being here?”
“Oh, I wish her to be here! It will do her good. If she is going to do—the same as I did, she ought to know.” She made a pause again—Lady Markham meanwhile growing pale with fright and panic, though she did not know what there could be to fear.
“There are some people who had begun to think that I was not so well ‘left’ as was expected,” she said; “but they were mistaken. I am very well ‘left.’ I am to have the house in Grosvenor Square, and the Knoll, and all the plate and carriages, and three parts or so of Mr Winterbourn’s fortune—so long as I remain Mr Winterbourn’s widow. He was, as you say, a just man.”