Margaret stood still, leaning upon the table, but she spoke no word, either in answer to the threat or to the tears. Her immediate object was to take herself out of the room, but this she did not know how to achieve. At last her aunt spoke again: “If you please, I will get you to ask your landlady to send for a cab.” Then the cab was procured, and Buggins, who had come home for his dinner, handed her ladyship in. Not a word had been spoken during the time that the cab was being fetched, and when Lady Ball went down the passage, she merely said, “I wish you good-bye, Margaret.”

“Good-bye,” said Margaret, and then she escaped to her own bedroom.

Lady Ball had not done her work well. It was not within her power to induce Margaret to renounce her engagement, and had she known her niece better, I do not think that she would have made the attempt. She did succeed in learning that Margaret had received no renewal of an offer from her son,—that there was, in fact, no positive engagement now existing between them; and with this, I think, she should have been satisfied. Margaret had declared that she demanded nothing from her cousin, and with this assurance Lady Ball should have been contented. But she had thought to carry her point, to obtain the full swing of her will, by means of a threat, and had forgotten that in the very words of her own menace she conveyed to Margaret some intimation that her son was still desirous of doing that very thing which she was so anxious to prevent. There was no chance that her threat should have any effect on Margaret. She ought to have known that the tone of the woman’s mind was much too firm for that. Margaret knew—was as sure of it as any woman could be sure—that her cousin was bound to her by all ties of honour. She believed, too, that he was bound to her by love, and that if he should finally desert it, he would be moved to do so by mean motives. It was no anger on the score of Mr Maguire that would bring him to such a course, no suspicion that she was personally unworthy of being his wife. Our Griselda, with all her power of suffering and willingness to suffer, understood all that, and was by no means disposed to give way to any threat from Lady Ball.