Madam Melcombe shed a few tears.  Both her sons looked disturbed, and very ill at ease.  She sat down again, and they sat opposite to her.  Then there was such a long, awkward pause, and her poor hand trembled so much, that at last, as if in order to give her time to feel more at ease, her younger son began to talk to her of her grand-daughter who lived with her, and of her little great-grandson, Peter Melcombe.  He hoped, he said with gravity, that they were well.

There seemed to be nothing else that either of them could think of to say; and presently, helped by the rest their words gave her, Madam Melcombe recovered her self-possession.

“Son Dan’el,” she said, “my time must be short now; and I have sent for you and your brother to ask a favour of you.  I could not lie easy in my grave,” she continued, “if I thought there would be nobody of all my children to follow me.  I have none but poor Peter’s daughter and grandson here now, and I hope you and Augustus and your sons will come to my funeral.  I hope you’ll promise me faithfully, both of you, that you’ll certainly come and follow me to the grave.”

A silence followed.  The disappointment of both the sons was evident.

They had hoped, the younger remarked, that she might have had something else to say.

No, she had not, she answered.  Where would be the good of that?  They had written to her often enough about that.

And then she went on to repeat her request.  There was nothing she would not do for them, nothing, if they would but promise to come.

“So be it,” replied the elder; “but then, you must make me a promise, mother, in your turn.”

“It isn’t the land?” she inquired with humble hesitation.  “I should be agreeable to that.”

“No, God forbid!  What you have to promise me is, that if I come to your funeral, you will make such a will that not one acre of the land or one shilling you possess shall ever come to me or mine.”

“And,” said the other promptly, “I make the same promise, on the same condition.”

Then there was another pause, deeper and more intense than the first.  The old mother’s face passed through many changes, always with an air of cogitation and trouble; and the old sons watched her in such a suspense of all movement, that it seemed as if they scarcely breathed.

“You sent your cards in,” she said as if with sudden recollection, “to remind me that you’d kept your father’s name?”

“Nothing will ever induce either of us to change it,” was the answer.

“You’re very hard on me, son Dan’el,” she said at last; “for you know you was always my favourite son.”

A touching thing to say to such an old man; but there was no reply.

“And I never took any pride in Peter,” she continued, “he was that undutiful; and his grandson’s a mere child.”

Still no reply.

“I was in hopes, if I could get speech of you, I should find you’d got reasonable with age, Dan’el; for God knows you was as innocent of it as the babe unborn.”