“Good Lord, Patty!” cried Miss Hewitt. “Roger Pearson! where ever did you see Roger Pearson? I thought that was all over and done with!”
“What did you please to mean by that remark?” said Patty, with great dignity. “It doesn’t matter where I saw him. I did see him; and there’s not many girls would have gone on with the backgammon and—the rest, as I did, just that night. Aunt Patience, you may know a few things, but you don’t know the trials of a married woman.”
“The trials!” said Miss Hewitt. “I’ve known a many that have boasted of the advantage it was. But trials—no. You’ll be very willing, I shouldn’t wonder, to have ’em again.”
“That depends upon many things; but I think not,” said Patty.
“You mightn’t be lucky the first time, and yet be lucky the second,” said her aunt; “but it can’t be said to be unlucky, Patty, when it leaves you here, not twenty-five yet, with this grand property all to yourself. Lord! I thought you was lucky at the first, when you got ’im; for I knew they couldn’t put ’im out of ’is rights, Softy or no Softy; but just think the luck you’ve had since; ’is mother dead afore you come home, and that was a blessing, and then ’imself just a blessed release, and then——”
“I’ll thank you, Aunt Patience, not to speak of my husband in that way. A release! Who’d have dared to say a word if Gervase had been here? Oh!” she said, springing up from her seat, and stamping her foot upon the carpet, “and here I am for ever and ever just what I am now, when I would have been my lady all my life, and nobody to stop me, if he had lived but six months more!”
“Dear, and that’s true,” said Miss Hewitt deeply struck with the tragedy of the event. “I do pity you, my pet! my poor darling! That’s true, that’s true!”
While this scene was going on in Greyshott, Gerald and Margaret were jogging on towards Chillfold in their hired chaise. They had a great deal to say, and yet there were long silences between them. Gerald was more angry, Margaret more sad.
“I should have minded nothing else,” the Colonel said, “if he had kept the old house for us, the house that has produced us all—Greyshott, that has never belonged but to a Piercey; and, Meg, if he had done justice to you.”
“There was no justice owing to me,” she said. “I left the house at my own free will. I belong to another house and another name——”