“The property will go to him, but he has had nothing to do with it. Mr Slow found it out.”

“It can’t be so, not after twenty years. Whatever they may have done from Walter, they can’t take it away from you; not if you’ve spirit enough to stand up for your rights. If you let them take it in that way, I can’t tell you what I shall think of you.”

“It is my own lawyer that says so.”

“Yes, Mr Slow; the biggest rogue of them all. I always knew that of him, always. Oh, Margaret, think of the children! What are we to do? What are we to do?” And sitting down on the bedside, she put her dirty apron up to her eyes.

“I have been thinking of them ever since I heard it,” said Margaret.

“But what good will thinking do? You must do something. Oh! Margaret, after all that you said to him when he lay there dying!” and the woman, with some approach to true pathos, put her hand on the spot where her husband’s head had rested. “Don’t let his children come to beggary because men like that choose to rob the widow and the orphan.”

“Every one has a right to what is his own,” said Margaret. “Even though widows should be beggars, and orphans should want.”

“That’s very well of you, Margaret. It’s very well for you to say that, who have friends like the Balls to stand by you. And, perhaps, if you will let him have it all without saying anything, he will stand by you firmer than ever. But who is there to stand by me and my children? It can’t be that after twenty years your fortune should belong to anyone else. Why should it have gone on for more than twenty years, and nobody have found it out? I don’t believe it can come so, Margaret, unless you choose to let them do it. I don’t believe a word of it.”

There was nothing more to be said upon that subject at present. Mrs Tom did indeed say a great deal more about it, sometimes threatening Margaret, and sometimes imploring her; but Miss Mackenzie herself would not allow herself to speak of the thing otherwise than as an ascertained fact. Had the other woman been more reasonable or less passionate in her lamentations Miss Mackenzie might have trusted herself to tell her that there was yet a doubt. But she herself felt that the doubt was so small, and that, in Mrs Tom’s mind, it would be so magnified into nearly a certainty on the other side, that she thought it most discreet not to refer to the exact amount of information which Mr Slow had given to her.

“It will be best for us to think, Sarah,” she said, trying to turn the other’s mind away from the coveted income which she would never possess—“to think what you and the children had better do.”