Alas! not with these, or rather this woman, Aunt Maria being merely the adjective of that very determined substantive, Aunt Henrietta.  She braced herself to the battle immediately.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Grey; but I cannot see what right you have to question me, or I to answer.  Am I not capable of the management of my own sister’s children, who have been under my care ever since she died, and in whom I never supposed you would take the slightest interest?”

This after her charge of Arthur—­when she had nursed the child back to life again, and knew that he still depended upon her for everything in life!  But, knowing it was so, the secret truth was enough to sustain her under any heap of falsehoods—­opposing falsehoods, too, directly contradicting one another; but Miss Gascoigne never paused to consider that.  Lax-tongued people seldom do.

“I will not question the point of my interest in the children.  If I can not prove it in other ways than words, the latter would be very useless.  All I wish to say is, that I should like to have been consulted before any thing was decided as to a governess, and I am afraid Miss Bennett is not exactly the person I should have chosen.”

“Indeed!  And pray, why not, may I ask?  She is a most respectable person—­a person who knows her place.  I am sure the deference with which she treats me, the attention with which she listens to all my suggestions, have given me the utmost confidence in the young woman; all the more, because, I repeat, she knows her place.  She is content to be a governess; she never pretends to be a lady.”

The insult was so pointed, so plain, that it could not be passed over.

Christian rose from her seat.  “Miss Gascoigne, seeing that I am here at the head of my husband’s table, I must request you to be a little more guarded in your conversation.  I, too, have been a governess, but it never occurred to me that I was otherwise than a lady.”

There was a dead silence, during which poor Aunt Maria cast imploring looks at Aunt Henrietta, who perhaps felt that she had gone too far, for she muttered some vague apology about “different people being different in their ways.”

“Exactly so and what I meant to observe was, that my chief reason for doubting Miss Bennett’s fitness to instruct Titia is what you yourself allow.  If she is ‘not a lady,’ how can you expect her to make a lady of our little girl?”

“Our little girl?”

“Yes, our” the choking tears came as far as Christian’s throat, and then were swallowed down again.  “My little girl, if you will; for she is mine—­my husband’s daughter and I wish to see her grow up every thing that his daughter ought to be.  I say again, I ought to have been consulted in the choice of her governess.”

She stopped for, accidentally looking out of the window, where the lengthened spring twilight still lingered in the cloisters, she fancied she saw creeping from pillar to pillar a child’s figure; could it possibly be Titia’s?  Yes, it certainly was Titia herself, stealing through two sides of the quad-rectangle and under the archway that led to Walnut-tree Court.