"Well!—blow Emma up if you like, but it was no fault of hers. Where's Marianne?"
"Will you have the goodness to wait till I have done with this gurl?"
Challis returned into the drawing-room, and waited. Emma—he said to himself—was catching it hot. He felt in his pocket to make sure of half-a-crown, as a solatium, in case Emma showed him out.
Nothing lasts for ever. "Such a thing again, and you go!" was the last shot from the old lady's citadel at the servant. And her first at himself was, "Now you!" He accepted the challenge.
"Where is Marianne?" But an attack of coughing stopped the old woman's reply; and when it subsided, and left him free to repeat his question, he re-worded it, "Where is my wife?"
"My daughter is not your wife."
"Very well, grandmamma, let's pretend she isn't. Where is your daughter? Where's Marianne?"
"What do you want with her?" The speech and the speaker are sullen, dogged, and in deadly earnest. If Challis plays any impish tricks—and he isn't taking the old cat seriously; witness that malicious twinkle in his eye!—there will be an explosion, and a bad one.
"What do I want with her? Why, of course, to come back and live in Sin with me, like a dutiful wife. Stop a bit, though, grandmamma! Perhaps you don't know about Marianne's letter—the letter she left for me when she bolted off yesterday! Do you, or don't you?"
"I refuse to be catechized. I am in my daughter's confidence, and I know exactly what she has written and what she has not written." The suggestion was that Challis's report would be untrustworthy. She seemed to warm to her subject. "Marianne has told me everything, and she has my fullest concurrence in the step she has taken."