Verna’s heart was beating wildly. She could scarcely contain the sudden flood of triumph that had poured into all her veins. At last she was going to be a great lady. Everything would be in her hands. Marry! why, what was marrying to this? But she restrained herself, to make assurance sure.
“Poor little Tommy,” she said, with a demure and measured tone, which was put on to hide her emotion, “only three years old; is it possible that he is the master, of all this—that everything depends on him?”
“Poor child!” said Fanshawe.
What a farce these words seemed! Oh happy child, blessed child, most fortunate baby, with eighteen years of a minority before him, and his aunt, Inverna Bassett, the only clever one of the family to do everything for him! But she dared not betray the exultation that coursed through all her veins.
“I hope Miss Heriot will come to see us to-morrow,” she said. “It will be better for—all of us—if she will be friendly and come.”
Somehow there was a change of inflection in this which caught Fanshawe’s ear. He was quite incapable of defining what it meant. The rapid revolution of sentiment, the change from humility and doubt into superiority and certainty, the implied warning, too delicate to be a threat, that it would be better “for all of us” that the daughter of the house should visit its new mistress, all these gradations of thought went beyond his capacity. He did not understand; but still his ear, though not his intelligence, caught some change in the tone.
“I do not think,” he said, with some coldness, though he could not have told why, “that we shall be able to persuade Miss Heriot to rest beyond to-day.”
“I am glad of that,” said Verna. “I mean I shall be very glad to see her. I saw her, it is true, yesterday, here, but she did not notice me. Of course it was a terrible moment for her—and for all of us,” she added, with a little meaning. “Matty’s first coming home—”
Was there a little emphasis on that last word? Certainly there was a change of tone.
Fanshawe was confused; he could not quite tell why. As for Verna, her little brain was in a whirl. She wanted to be alone to think. She put up her eye-glass once more, and inspected the house with such a wild sense of power that her faculties for the moment seemed taken from her.