“What would such a promise be worth if John Ball got hold of her money? That’s what they’re after, as sure as my name is Martha; and what she’s after too, very likely. She was there once before she went to Littlebath at all. They want to get their uncle’s money back, and she wants to be a baronet’s wife.”

The same view of the matter was perhaps taken by Mr Rubb, junior, when he was told that Miss Mackenzie was to pass through London on her way to the Cedars, though he did not express his fears openly, as Mrs Mackenzie had done.

“Why don’t you ask your sister to stay in Gower Street?” he said to his partner.

“She wouldn’t come.”

“You might at any rate ask her.”

“What good would it do?”

“Well; I don’t know that it would do any good; but it wouldn’t do any harm. Of course it’s natural that she should wish to have friends about her; and it will only be natural too that she should marry some one.”

“She may marry whom she pleases for me.”

“She will marry whom she pleases; but I suppose you don’t want to see her money go to the Balls.”

“I shouldn’t care a straw where her money went,” said Thomas Mackenzie, “if I could only know that this sum which we have had from her was properly arranged. To tell you the truth, Rubb, I’m ashamed to look my sister in the face.”

“That’s nonsense. Her money is as right as the bank; and if in such matters as that brothers and sisters can’t take liberties with each other, who the deuce can?”

“In matters of money nobody should ever take a liberty with anybody,” said Mr Mackenzie.

He knew, however, that a great liberty had been taken with his sister’s money, and that his firm had no longer the power of providing her with the security which had been promised to her.

Mr Mackenzie would take no steps, at his partner’s instance, towards arresting his sister in London; but Mr Rubb was more successful with Mrs Mackenzie, with whom, during the last month or two, he had contrived to establish a greater intimacy than had ever previously existed between the two families. He had been of late a good deal in Gower Street, and Mrs Mackenzie had found him to be a much pleasanter and better educated man than she had expected. Such was the language in which she expressed her praise of him, though I am disposed to doubt whether she herself was at all qualified to judge of the education of any man. He had now talked over the affairs of Margaret Mackenzie with her sister-in-law, and the result of that talking was that Mrs Mackenzie wrote a letter to Littlebath, pressing Miss Mackenzie to stay a few days in Gower Street, on her way through London. She did this as well as she knew how to do it; but still there was that in the letter which plainly told an apt reader that there was no reality in the professions of affection made in it. Miss Mackenzie became well aware of the fact as she read her sister’s words. Available hypocrisy is a quality very difficult of attainment and of all hypocrisies, epistolatory hypocrisy is perhaps the most difficult. A man or woman must have studied the matter very thoroughly, or be possessed of great natural advantages in that direction, who can so fill a letter with false expressions of affection, as to make any reader believe them to be true. Mrs Mackenzie was possessed of no such skill.