“Forgive me for speaking as I did,” pleaded Ethel, with eyes that were blinded with tears. “But, indeed, I am so overcome by what you have told me, and what I have just read, that I know not either what to say or what to do.”
“There is nothing for you to do—nothing whatever,” said Miss Matilda, still with a touch of peremptoriness.
“And perhaps, my dear, if you were to say as little as possible just now, it might be as well,” interposed Miss Jane for the first time. Then turning to her sister, she added: “The poor child needs a little time to recover herself.”
“There I agree with you, and I think the best thing she can do is to go and lie down for an hour.” Then to Ethel, with a sudden softening of the voice, she said: “Child, child, cannot you understand that, despite all you have learnt to-day, nothing is to be changed—that you are still to be our niece, and we are still to be your aunts, and that everything is to go on precisely as before? Vale View will continue to be your home, as it has been for as long as you can remember, and you must never again hint at such a thing as going out into the world to earn your living, unless you wish your aunts to believe that you have ceased to care for them.”
“And,” added Miss Jane, with one of her sweetest smiles, “that you are tired of living under the same roof with two humdrum old women.”
What reply Ethel would have made will never be known, because at this juncture there came a tap at the door, which was followed by the appearance of Charlotte, the parlourmaid, carrying a salver with a card on it. “If you please, ma’am,” said the girl, “I’ve shown the lady into the morning-room.”
“Tell Mrs. Lucas Dexter that I and my sister will be with her almost immediately,” answered Miss Matilda, after a glance at the card.
As the girl left the room by one door, Ethel stole softly out by another.
The sisters looked at each other. It was a look which said, as plainly as words could have done, “How very fortunate that we happen to be wearing our puce lutestrings and our best caps this afternoon!”
The Hon. Mrs. Lucas Dexter was one of the great ladies of the neighbourhood, and had never condescended to call at Vale View but twice before, on both of which occasions she had contrived to extract a small cheque from the sisters. Indeed, it was a peculiarity of hers never to call upon anyone who was not quite in her own set, or whose position in the social scale, which in small provincial centres is marked by so many gradations, was admittedly below her own, without making them pay for the privilege in the shape of a subscription to one or other of the benevolent schemes in which she professed to be interested. Those among the small gentry of St. Oswyth’s, and such of the professional people as were tolerably well-to-do, would have been pleased to have the Hon. Mrs. Lucas Dexter call upon them twice as often as she did, and would have looked upon the two or three guineas of which each of her visits depleted them as money well laid out, in so far as it had been the means of securing her presence for a quarter of an hour in their drawing-rooms. But there were others, to whom every guinea was an object, who would have been glad if she had passed them by altogether, and who groaned in spirit, while smiling a sickly smile, when the inevitable tablets and pencil were produced, and Mrs. Dexter, fixing her victim through her pince-nez, said, with that stand-and-deliver air which few people were found bold enough to resist: “And pray, what sum shall I have the pleasure of putting down opposite your name?”