did she come, and how did you hear of her?"

She spoke quite gently, in mere inquiry; she was so anxious neither to
give nor to take offense, if it could possibly be avoided. She bore
always in mind a sentence her husband had once quoted--and, though a
clergyman, he did not often quote the Bible, he only lived it: "As much
as in you lieth, live peaceably with all men." But she sometimes
wondered, with a kind of sad satire, whether the same could ever, under
any circumstances, be done with all women.

Alas! not with these, or rather this woman, Aunt Maria being merely
the adjective of that very determined substantive, Aunt Henrietta. She
braced herself to the battle immediately.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Grey; but I cannot see what right you have to
question me, or I to answer. Am I not capable of the management of
my own sister's children, who have been under my care ever since she
died, and in whom I never supposed you would take the slightest
interest?"

This after her charge of Arthur--when she had nursed the child back to
life again, and knew that he still depended upon her for everything in
life! But, knowing it was so, the secret truth was enough to sustain her
under any heap of falsehoods--opposing falsehoods, too, directly
contradicting one another; but Miss Gascoigne never paused to
consider that. Lax-tongued people seldom do.

"I will not question the point of my interest in the children. If I can not
prove it in other ways than words, the latter would be very useless. All
I wish to say is, that I should like to have been consulted before any