Still failing to gain a response to her gloomy prognostications, Mrs. Garth replied to her own inquiry.

“None on us knows, I reckon!  And what a down-come it wad be for her, poor creatur!”

“She’s sticking to that subject like a cockelty burr,” said Liza, not troubling this time to speak beneath her breath.  “What ever does she mean by it?”

Rotha was beginning to feel concerned on the same score, so she said:  “Mrs. Ray, poor soul, is not likely to come to a worse pass while she has two sons to take care of her.”

“No good to her, nowther on ’em—­no good, I reckon; mair’s the pity,” murmured Mrs. Garth, calling her apron once more into active service.

“How so?” Rotha could not resist the temptation to probe these mysterious deliverances.

“Leastways, not ‘xcept the good dear man as is gone, Angus hissel’, made a will for her; and, as I say to my Joey, there’s no knowin’ as ever he did; and nowther is there.”

Rotha replied that it was not usual for a statesman to make a will.  The law was clear enough as to inheritance.  There could be no question of Mrs. Ray’s share of what had been left.  Besides, if there were, it would not matter much in her case, where everything that was the property of her sons was hers, and everything that was hers was theirs.

Mrs. Garth pricked up her ears at this.  She could not conceal her interest in what Rotha had said, and throwing aside her languor, she asked, in anything but a melancholy tone, “So he’s left all hugger-mugger, has he?”

“I know nothing of that,” replied Rotha; “but if he has not made a will it cannot concern us at all.  It’s all very well for the lords of the manor and such sort of folk to make their wills, for, what with one thing and another, their property runs cross and cross, and there’s scarce any knowing what way it lies; but for a statesman owning maybe a hundred or two of acres and a thousand or two of sheep, forby a house and the like, it’s not needful at all.  The willing is all done by the law.”

“So it is, so it is, lass,” said Mrs. Garth.  The girls thought there was a cruel and sinister light in the old woman’s eyes as she spoke.  “Ey, the willin’s all done by t’ law; but, as I says to my Joey, ’It isn’t always done to our likin’, Joey’; and nowther is it.”

Liza could bear no longer Mrs. Garth’s insinuating manner.  Coming forward with a defiant air, the little woman said:  “Look you, don’t you snurl so; but if you’ve anything to say, just open your mouth and tell us what it’s about.”

The challenge was decidedly unequivocal.

“’Od bliss the lass!” cried Mrs. Garth with an air of profound astonishment “What ails the bit thing?”

“Look here, you’ve got a deal too much talk to be jannic, you have,” cried Liza, with an emphasis intended to convey a sense of profound contempt of loquaciousness in general and of Mrs. Garth’s loquaciousness in particular.