‘Leave the house, ma’am?’ said Martha, awestruck.

’There are other houses in the world, I suppose, in which an old woman can live and die.’

‘There is houses, ma’am, of course,’

‘And what is the difference between one and another?’

’I wouldn’t do it, ma’am, if I was you.  I wouldn’t do it if it was ever so.  Sure the house is big enough for Mr Brooke and Miss Dorothy along with you.  I wouldn’t go and make such change as that, I wouldn’t indeed, ma’am.’  Martha spoke out almost with eloquence, so much expression was there in her face.  Miss Stanbury said nothing more at the moment, beyond signifying her indisposition to make up her mind to anything at the present moment.  Yes the house was big enough as far as rooms were concerned; but how often had she heard that an old woman must always be in the way, if attempting to live with a newly-married couple?  If a mother-in-law be unendurable, how much more so one whose connection would be less near?  She could keep her own house no doubt, and let them go elsewhere; but what then would come of her old dream, that Burgess, the new banker in the city, should live in the very house that had been inhabited by the Burgesses, the bankers of old?  There was certainly only one way out of all these troubles, and that way would be that she should go from them and be at rest.

Her will had now been drawn out and completed for the third or fourth time, and she had made no secret of is contents either with Brooke or Dorothy.  The whole estate she left to Brooke, including the houses which were to become his after his uncle’s death; and in regard to the property she had made no further stipulation.  ’I might have settled it on your children,’ she said to him, ’but in doing so I should have settled it on hers.  I don’t know why an old woman should try to interfere with things after she has gone.  I hope you won’t squander it, Brooke.’

‘I shall be a steady old man by that time,’ he said.

’I hope you’ll be steady at any rate.  But there it is, and God must direct you in the use of it, if He will.  It has been a burthen to me; but then I have been a solitary old woman.’  Half of what she had saved she proposed to give Dorothy on her marriage, and for doing this arrangements had already been made.  There were various other legacies, and the last she announced was one to her nephew, Hugh.  ’I have left him a thousand pounds,’ she said to Dorothy ’so that he may remember me kindly at last’ As to this, however, she exacted a pledge that no intimation of the legacy was to be made to Hugh.  Then it was that Dorothy told her aunt that Hugh intended to marry Nora Rowley, one of the ladies who had been at the Clock House during the days in which her mother had lived in grandeur; and then it was also that Dorothy obtained leave to invite Hugh to her own wedding.  ’I hope she will be happier than her sister,’ Miss Stanbury said, when she heard of the intended marriage.