“I’ll thank you, Aunt Patience, not to speak of my husband in that way. A release! Who’d have dared to say a word if Gervase had been here? Oh!” she said, springing up from her seat, and stamping her foot upon the carpet, “and here I am for ever and ever just what I am now, when I would have been my lady all my life, and nobody to stop me, if he had lived but six months more!” “Dear, and that’s true,” said Miss Hewitt deeply struck with the tragedy of the event. “I do pity you, my pet! my poor darling! That’s true, that’s true!” While this scene was going on in Greyshott, Gerald and Margaret were jogging on towards Chillfold in their hired chaise. They had a great deal to say, and yet there were long silences between them. Gerald was more angry, Margaret more sad. “I should have minded nothing else,” the Colonel said, “if he had kept the old house for us, the house that has produced us all--Greyshott, that has never belonged but to a Piercey; and, Meg, if he had done justice to you.” “There was no justice owing to me,” she said. “I left the house at my own free will. I belong to another house and another name----” “That might have been true,” said Colonel Piercey, with something of his old stiffness and severity, “if----” “It is true,” she said, “I am of the family of my child.” “Oh,” he cried, “what folly, at your age! I was angry to have lost you; but now, I can’t tell how it is, you are Meg Piercey again.” “You have got used to my changed looks,” she said. “You have accepted the fact that I am no longer in my teens. But this is not worth discussing when there is so much more to think of. What shall you do? or, indeed, what can you do?” “Fight it, certainly,” he said. “As soon as I have taken you home, I am to meet old Pownceby, and lay the whole case before the best man we can get. Thank Heaven, I am not without means to fight it out. Poor Uncle Giles! It is hard to call him up to a reckoning before all the world; but he could not have meant it; he could never have meant it.” “I have his little tip for Osy,” said Margaret, with tears in her eyes. “His little tip! when he ought to have provided for the boy!” “Poor Uncle Giles! He was never very strong: and I believe she was very kind to him, and he was fond of her.” “Do you want me to accept this absurd will, this loss to the race, because she was kind to him (granting that)--and an old man, in his dotage, was fond of a scheming woman?” “Don’t call names,” said Margaret. “He was not in his dotage. We saw him----” “Ah--called on purpose, that we might help to establish the fact,” said Colonel Piercey, fiercely. “What do you call it but dotage--that tip over which you are inclined to weep; and the reason alleged for it, that you had been the first to tell him something? Yes, I know what that means. Pownceby told me. That’s--how long since? But he believed it, just the same as ever, in the same kind of distant hope. What is that but dotage, Meg?”