“Did you hear what she said about Charley being the true owner of the estate?” said Miss Laura. “After all dear Tom has done!” said Miss Lydia. “Oh, how strangely things do turn out!” cried the elder sister. “He might have done so much better; and to get himself into all this trouble and nobody even grateful to him,” said the younger. “Poor dear Tom!” they both cried together, “he deserved such a different wife.” Such was the aspect of affairs on the other side; and though it is natural to take part with poor Mary rather than with her subtle and skilful husband, perhaps his sisters were not altogether wrong. If they had not, all of them, got somehow into conflict with nature, things might have happened very differently. As it was, a perpetual false position created mischief on every side. CHAPTER VIII.—THE EVE OF THE BIRTHDAY. “I have asked old Gateshead to bring over the deeds you executed before our marriage, Mary,” said Mr Summerhayes, a few days before Charley came of age; “I want to look over them again.” “Yes!” said Mary, stopping suddenly in what she was doing, and giving one furtive glance at him. She asked no farther question, but waited with an anxious intensity of interest which almost stopped the breath on her lips. “I want to look over them again—there are some words in the duplicates up-stairs I don’t feel quite sure about,” said Mr Summerhayes. “But, Tom, you told me they were irrevocable, and never could be meddled with,” said Mary, with a sudden flush of burning colour, which passed away immediately, leaving her very pale. It had been all her comfort for many a day to think that those deeds were beyond her power—or his—to change. She could not help trembling in this sudden terror. She had no confidence in her own power to resist him—and, alas, but a wavering, uncertain confidence in him, that he would be able to resist the temptation of securing, if a change were possible, a stronger title to all the authority and power he at present, in her right, possessed. “Do you imagine I want them meddled with?” said Mr Summerhayes. “I don’t think women understand what honesty or honour means,” he added, in his harshest tone. “I suppose you believe I am ready to perjure myself, or break my word, or do anything that’s base, for a bit of your estate.” “Indeed, Tom, I never thought anything of the kind,” said poor Mary, faltering; but she had thought something of the kind, though her thoughts were incapable of such decided expression, and the tremor in her voice betrayed her.