“And it was there you used to have your work?”
“Yes, Aunt Jean—but—”
“And that’s the bow-window Thomas Heriot was so foolish as to make, poor shortsighted haverel of a man, for his bonnie May?”
“Oh, Aunty, yes! I have had the good of it so long—but if I had never enjoyed it at all,” cried Marjory with tears, “I should be glad to think he had done it—for me!”
“Ay, ay,” said the old woman, “that’s how the world goes. For his bonnie May! I tell ye there were things once done like that for a bonnie Jean—that has not been bonnie this many, many a day—and the strangers get the good of them. That’s how the world goes.”
“What are they talking about?” said Matilda to Verna. “What an old witch she looks! I know she means to be disagreeable. But don’t you think I shall give in, not for all the Heriots in the world. I am not going to be interfered with by sisters, or aunts, or any other kind of relations. I mean to be mistress in my own house.”
“And of course you will do it your own silly way,” said Verna. “When you have the whole house by the ears, don’t ask me to come in and help you, that is all. I never saw anyone so hard-hearted, so silly, so cruel—”
“Oh, I like that,” said Matilda, with a fool’s invincible barbarity. “If I were as cruel as you call me, how long would it be before I sent you back?”
Mr. Charles came into the room at this moment, moody and absent, still full of his own thoughts. His chimney-corner was covered with an old red Indian shawl. Matilda had tried that too this morning, and found it a comfortable seat, though rather too warm for the season. “In Winter it will be charming,” she had said, and left her shawl, her air-cushion, and her footstool, by way of showing her appropriation of the place. Somehow that flag of the invader caught Mr. Charles’s eye even when he drew his chair into the middle of the room, and greeted Aunt Jean with the seriousness which was appropriate to a visit of condolence. “You see us in sad circumstances, very sad circumstances,” he said.
“Some of you bear up wonderfully considering all things,” said Miss Jean, “though perhaps not this girl here, who is a perfect shadow. A funeral visit’s a dreary thing, Chairlie Heriot, and I did not come just to condole. I had a good enough guess how things would be, having gone through it myself; and I came to ask what were your plans, and what was to be done with Marjory? I suppose she does not mean to stay here.”