“But you were never, that I remember, taigled in this way before,” Mrs. Buchanan said. “I was perhaps never brought face to face before with a woman determined to say her say, and that will take no telling. My dear, if you will free me of her, you will do the best day’s work for me you have ever done in your life.” “There must be something of the first importance in what she has to say.” “To herself, I have no doubt,” said the minister, with a deep sigh. “I am thinking there is no subject in the world that has the interest our own affairs have to ourselves. She is just never done: and all about herself.” “I am not a woman to pry into my neighbour’s concerns: but this must be some sore burden on her conscience, Claude, since she has so much to say to you.” “Do you think so?” he cried. “Well, that might perhaps be an explanation: for what I have to do with her small income, and her way of spending her money, and her house, and her servants, I cannot see. There is one thing that gives it a sting to me. I cannot forget that we have something to do with the smallness of her income,” Mr. Buchanan said. “We to do with smallness of her income! I will always maintain,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “that the money was the old man’s, and that he had the first right to give it where he pleased; but, dear Claude, man, you that should ken--what could that poor three hundred give her? Fifteen pound per annum; and what is fifteen pound per annum?--not enough to pay that English maid with all her airs and graces. If it had been as many thousands, there might have been some justice it.” “That is perhaps an idea,” said the harassed minister, “if we were to offer her the interest, Mary? My dear, what would you say to that? It would be worse than ever to gather together that money and pay it back; but fifteen pounds a year, that might be a possible thing; you might put your shoulder to the wheel, and pay her that.” “Claude,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “are you sure that is all the woman is wanting? I cannot think it can be that. It is just something that is on her conscience, and she wants to put it off on you.” “My dear,” said the minister, “you’re a very clever woman, but you are wrong there. I have heard nothing about her conscience, it is her wrongs that she tells to me.” The conversation had eased his mind a little, and his wife’s steady confidence in his complete innocence in the matter, and the perfect right of old Anderson to do what he liked with his own money, was always, for the moment at least, refreshing to his soul: though he soon fell back on the reflection that the only fact of any real importance in the matter was the one she never knew. Mrs. Buchanan was a little disconcerted by the failure of her prevision, but she would not recede. “If she has not done it yet, she will do it sometime. Mind what I am saying to you, Claude: there is something on her conscience, and she wants to put it off on you.”