At another time the falseness, the selfishness, the greed, the utter injustice of that letter would have pained Lucy. It scarcely hurt her now. She showed it to Miss Latimer, and Mr. Somerset, and Mrs. May, and they were all indignant; but as for Lucy, she only smiled dimly.
“We have done all we can,” she said. “We can’t do any more. And we must not judge these Micklewraths too harshly. We do not know how sane and reasonable Clementina may appear to them, just as she did to us. I should not have been readily incredulous of any story Clementina might have told me about any of our tradespeople or neighbours.”
It was a suspicious circumstance that Clementina’s nearest relations at Inverslain preserved a dead silence so far as the little house with the verandah was concerned. It appeared, however, that they wrote to Mrs. Bray’s Rachel. She forwarded their letter to Mrs. Challoner. It, too, was brief and guarded, but was quite different in its tone. It was written by Clementina’s brother, who deplored the trouble his sister had given everybody—“precisely as she did when she left the Highlands without telling us where she was going or what she meant to do. She is an excitable woman,” he added, “who dwells on things too much and takes violent fancies.” His conclusion was that, “as her aunt and uncle at Hull had taken her in—which was more than he and his wife would dare do, owing to Clementina’s temper—he hoped they would look after her, and she might quiet down after a bit.”
Poor Rachel was quite self-accusatory at the sad failure of her “introduction,” though really it was hard to see how she could blame herself, since her recommendation had not gone one whit beyond very good and reasonable grounds, known to herself. She ended her letter by saying—
“I fear my dear mistress is very ill indeed. I don’t think she believes it of herself. At least, she doesn’t wish us to know she believes it. I don’t imagine she will live to return to her old house. I don’t think she could be moved from here. I shouldn’t be surprised myself if the end came at any moment. Mr. and Mrs. Brand have been most kind. My mistress quite looks forward to see them at almost every week’s end.”
(To be continued.)
HOUSEHOLD HINTS.
To Boil an Egg.
Method.—Have ready a saucepan of boiling water and put in the egg carefully with a spoon, taking care not to break the shell. Boil three minutes and a half for a soft-boiled egg, six minutes for a moderately hard one, and ten minutes for a hard-boiled egg.