been growing weaker and weaker, but there were times when she plucked up wonderfully, and when she would talk of things present, ay, and of things future, as though she had years of life to run. The girls encouraged her to talk. Dr. Osborne had told them that she must be "roused" as much as possible, and they would sit with her and chatter for hours, the old lady taking no inconsiderable share in the conversation. It was astonishing with what unanimity they had hitherto kept off the subject of the marriage, the very topic which one might have imagined would have been the first they would have discussed, but whenever they came near it, whenever they grew "warm," as children say in the old-fashioned game, they seemed by tacit instinct bound to draw away and leave it untouched. At last one day, after the married couple had been a week absent, Mrs. Ashurst said, quietly, "Maud, my dear! weren't you very much astonished when you heard your uncle was going to marry my Marian?"
"No, dear Mrs. Ashurst. Though I'm not very old, I've lived too long to be astonished at anything, and certainly that did not surprise me!"
"It did me!" said Gertrude, for once venturing on an independent remark.
"And why did it surprise you, Gerty?" asked the old lady, already smiling at the quaint reply which she always expected from Gertrude.
"Because I didn't think uncle was so silly!" Gertrude blurted out. "At least, I don't mean that exactly; don't misunderstand me, dear Mrs. Ashurst, but I never thought that uncle would marry again at all; such an idea never entered our heads, did it, Maud?" But Maud declining to play chorus, Gertrude continued: "And if I had thought of such a thing, I should always have set uncle down as marrying some one more his own age, and—and that kind of thing!"
"There is certainly a great disparity of years between them," said Mrs. Ashurst, with a sigh. "I trust that won't work to the disadvantage of my poor, dear girl!"
"I don't think you need fear that, dear old friend!" said Maud; and then thinking that her tone of voice might have been hard, she laid her hand on the old lady's shoulder and added, "Miss Ash—I mean Mrs. Creswell, you know, is wise beyond her years! She has already had the management of a large household, which, as I understand, she conducted excellently; and even did she show a few shortcomings, uncle is the last man to notice them!"
"Yes, my dear, I know; but I didn't mean that! I was selfishly thinking whether Marian had done rightly in accepting a man so much older than herself! She did it for my sake, poor child—she did it for my sake!" And the old lady burst into tears.
"Don't cry, dear!" said Gertrude. "You are not to blame, I'm sure, whatever has happened."
"How can you make yourself so perfectly ridiculous, Gertrude!" said strong-minded Maud. "No one is to blame about anything! And, my dear Mrs. Ashurst, I don't think, if I were you, I should look upon your daughter's present proceeding as such an act of self-sacrifice. Depend upon it she is very well pleased at her new dignity and position." Maud knew that the Creswells were only "new people," but she could not sit by and hear them patronised by a schoolmaster's widow.
"Well, my dear, very likely," said the old lady, meekly; "though she might have been a baronet's lady if she had only chosen. I'm sure young Sir Joseph Attride would have proposed to her, with a little more encouragement; and though my poor husband always said he had pudding in his head instead of brains, that wouldn't have been any just cause or impediment. You never heard about Sir Joseph, Maud?"
"No; Miss Ashurst never spoke to us of any of her conquests," said Maud, with something of a sneer.
"Well, my dear, Marian was never one to say much, you know; but I'm sure she might have done as well as any girl in the county, for the matter of that. There was Sir Joseph, and young Mr. Peacock, before he went up to live in London, and a young German, who was over here to learn English—Burckhardt his name was, and I think his friends were counts, or something of that kind, in their own country—oh, quite grand, I assure you!"
"I wonder whether uncle knows of all these former rivals?" asked Gertrude.
"No, my dear, of course he doesn't, and of course Marian would not be such a goose as to tell him. I think I'll sleep for a bit now, dears; I'm tired."
They kissed her, and left the room; but before the old lady had dropped off she said to herself, "I wasn't going to let them crow over me, or think that my Marian couldn't have had her pick and choice of a husband, if she'd been so minded."
