“Well, he speaks English perfectly, with only the very slightest accent. But I don’t think he’s at all like an Englishman,” said Anne. “In manner, I mean,” she added.
“Humph! More’s the pity. I don’t like foreigners.”
Anne was silent. She thought she did.
“He brought friends, you say? Well, tell them to come whenever they like, my dear. You’re quite old enough to look after them. Catherine Leslie—Dampierre, I mean, was a good friend to me. I should like to show hospitality to her boy.”
She turned over on the pillow, her voice growing weak.
“That will do, Anne. Nurse will see to me. I can’t talk ten minutes now without this dreadful faintness.”
The nurse came up to the bed, and Anne stepped aside, pausing at the door, to throw a pitying glance at the sharp profile against the pillow.
The old lady was growing visibly weaker, and Anne sorrowed. She was so lonely, so desolate at the end of life. Childless, almost friendless, for brusque and downright in manner, she had never possessed the happy art of engaging the affection of others, she was going down to the grave almost unregarded.
Few of her own generation were alive, and with the younger race she concerned herself but little. Anne knew that she had a nephew, her sister’s child. She had occasionally spoken of him as her heir, generally with the dry comment that she grudged him the money.
“He’s a great gaby,” she often declared, “and his vulgar wife will make ducks and drakes of my fortune.