“The house is dreadful changed, ma’am, and everything going wrong, I think, though it mayn’t be a servant’s place to speak.”
“I am afraid,” Mrs. Asquith said, “I am selfish. I think too much of my own. I can’t enter into the troubles of the new family. It’s only of the old I can think when I am here.”
“But oh! it’s no new family, ma’am; it’s the same family, it’s your own, own family,” cried Bessie Brown. “If you’re married ever so, you can’t give your natural relations up.”
“My natural relations!” Mary cried.
But the conversation by this time had caught the watchful ear of the housekeeper, who left Darrell and came back to see what was going on here.
“Brown,” she said, “what are you doing in this room? who told you to come and talk to a lady who is paying a visit in the house? I hope, Mrs. Asquith, you’ll excuse her. There is no rudeness meant,” the housekeeper said.
“My natural relations,” Mary repeated. “I don’t know what you mean. The house has passed into other hands. I don’t suppose there are any of my relations here.”
“Brown, you had better go to your work. I’ll answer the lady’s questions. We did not know till the other day that there was any relationship.”
“But,” said Mary bewildered, “it is Mrs. Rotherham——”
“Mrs. Prescott-Rotherham. My lady was an heiress. She married Mr. Prescott——”