"Very likely not, but I wish you to know it. What troubles me is
that she will have to pay so much out of it for legacy duty. I
might leave it all to you and you could give it her." An honester
or more religious or better woman than old Lady Ushant there was
not in Cheltenham, but it never crossed her conscience that it
would be wrong to cheat the revenue. It may be doubted whether any
woman has ever been brought to such honesty as that.
On the next morning Morton went away without saying another word in
private to Mary Masters and she was left to her quiet life with the
old lady. To an ordinary visitor nothing could have been less
exciting, for Lady Ushant very seldom went out and never
entertained company. She was a tall thin old lady with bright eyes
and grey hair and a face that was still pretty in spite of sunken
eyes and sunken cheeks and wrinkled brow. There was ever present
with her an air of melancholy which told a whole tale of the
sadness of a long life. Her chief excitement was in her two visits
to church on Sunday and in the letter which she wrote every week to
her nephew at Dillsborough. Now she had her young friend with her,
and that too was an excitement to her,--and the more so since she
had heard the tidings of Larry Twentyman's courtship.
She made up her mind that she would not speak on the subject to her
young friend unless her young friend should speak to her.
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