Paris was! Paris has much to answer for if it's killed my cousin
Thomas, for a better man never lived."

"Does Miss Matilda know of his illness?" asked I--a new light as to
the cause of her indisposition dawning upon me.

"Dear! to be sure, yes! Has not she told you? I let her know a
fortnight ago, or more, when first I heard of it. How odd she
shouldn't have told you!"

Not at all, I thought; but I did not say anything. I felt almost
guilty of having spied too curiously into that tender heart, and I
was not going to speak of its secrets--hidden, Miss Matty believed,
from all the world. I ushered Miss Pole into Miss Matilda's little
drawing-room, and then left them alone. But I was not surprised
when Martha came to my bedroom door, to ask me to go down to dinner
alone, for that missus had one of her bad headaches. She came into
the drawing-room at tea-time, but it was evidently an effort to
her; and, as if to make up for some reproachful feeling against her
late sister, Miss Jenkyns, which had been troubling her all the
afternoon, and for which she now felt penitent, she kept telling me
how good and how clever Deborah was in her youth; how she used to
settle what gowns they were to wear at all the parties (faint,
ghostly ideas of grim parties, far away in the distance, when Miss
Matty and Miss Pole were young!); and how Deborah and her mother
had started the benefit society for the poor, and taught girls
cooking and plain sewing; and how Deborah had once danced with a
lord; and how she used to visit at Sir Peter Arley's, and tried to
remodel the quiet rectory establishment on the plans of Arley Hall,
where they kept thirty servants; and how she had nursed Miss Matty