"Then you had something to do with it?"
"Of course I had," answered she. "I did my duty. I am not so young as I was. I had to think for Matabel's future. She is no child of mine. She can expect nothing from your father nor from me. When a good offer came, then I told her to accept and be thankful. She is a good girl, and has been useful in the house, and some people think her handsome. But young men don't court a girl who has no name, and has had three men hanged because of her."
"Mother! what nonsense! The men were executed because they murdered her father."
"It is all one. She is marked with the gallows. Ill-luck attaches to her. There has been a blight on her from the beginning. I mind when her father chucked her down all among the fly-poison. Now she has got the Broom-Squire, she may count herself lucky, and thank me for it."
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Iver. "Then this marriage is your doing?"
"Yes—I told her that, before you came here, I must have her clear out of the house."
"Why?"
A silence ensued. Mrs. Verstage looked at her son—into his great, brown eyes—and what she saw there alarmed her. Her lips moved to speak, but she could utter no words. She had let out her motive without consideration in the frankness that was natural to her.
"I ask, mother, why did you stop Matabel from writing, and take up the correspondence yourself at last; and then, when you did write to me at Guildford, you said not one word about Mehetabel being promised to the Broom-Squire?"
"I could not put all the news of the parish into my letter. How should I know that this concerned you?"