Then Miss Mackenzie, having considered for one moment, resolved to make a clean breast of it all, and this she did with the fewest possible words.

“I’m going to divide what I’ve got with them, and I hope it will make them comfortable.”

“What!” exclaimed her aunt.

“I’m going to give Sarah half what I’ve got, for her and her children. I shall have enough to live on left.”

“Margaret, you don’t mean it?”

“Not mean it? why not, aunt? You would not have me let them starve. Besides, I promised my brother when he was dying.”

“Then I must say he was very wrong, very wicked, I may say, to exact any such promise from you; and no such promise is binding. If you ask Sir John, or your lawyer, they will tell you so. What! exact a promise from you to the amount of half your income. It was very wrong.”

“But, aunt, I should do the same if I had made no promise.”

“No, you wouldn’t, my dear. Your friends wouldn’t let you. And indeed your friends must prevent it now. They will not hear of such a sacrifice being made.”

“But, aunt—”

“Well, my dear.”

“It’s my own, you know.” And Margaret, as she said this, plucked up her courage, and looked her aunt full in the face.

“Yes, it is your own, by law; but I don’t suppose, my dear, that you are of that disposition or that character that you’d wish to set all the world at defiance, and make everybody belonging to you feel that you had disgraced yourself.”

“Disgraced myself by relieving my brother’s family!”

“Disgraced yourself by giving to that woman money that has come to you as your fortune has come. Think of it, where it came from!”

“It came to me from my brother Walter.”

“And where did he get it? And who made it? And don’t you know that your brother Tom had his share of it, and wasted it all? Did it not all come from the Balls? And yet you think so little of that, that you are going to let that woman rob you of it—rob you and my grandchildren; for that, I tell you, is the way in which the world will look at it. Perhaps you don’t know it, but all that property was as good as given to John at one time. Who was it first took you by the hand when you were left all alone in Arundel Street? Oh, Margaret, don’t go and be such an ungrateful, foolish creature!”

Margaret waited for a moment, and then she answered—

“There’s nobody so near to me as my own brother’s children.”

“As to that, Margaret, there isn’t much difference in nearness between your uncle and your nephews and nieces. But there’s a right and a wrong in these things, and when money is concerned, people are not justified in indulging their fancies. Everything here has been told to you. You know how John is situated with his children. And after what there has been between you and him, and after what there still might be if you would have it so, I own that I am astonished—fairly astonished. Indeed, my dear, I can only look on it as simple weakness on your part. It was but the other day that you told me you had done all that you thought necessary by your brother in taking Susanna.”