“You may as well tell her yourself, Julius.”

“Do you wish me to be insulted by your sister Charlotte again?  It is too bad to put me in such a position.  I cannot punish two women, even for such shameful innuendos as I had to take when she sat at the head of the table.  You ought to reflect, too, that the rooms they occupy are the best rooms in the house,—­the master’s rooms.  I am going to have the oak walls polished, in order to bring out the carvings; and I think we will choose green and white for the carpets and curtains.  The present furniture is dreadfully old-fashioned, and horribly full of old memories.”

“Well, then, I shall give mother to understand that we expect to make these changes very soon.”

“Depend upon it, the sooner your mother and Charlotte go to their own house, the better for all parties.  For, if we do not insist upon it, they will stay and stay, until that Latrigg young man has his house finished.  Then Charlotte will expect to be married from here, and we shall have all the trouble and expense of the affair.  Oh, I tell you, Sophia, I see through the whole plan!  But reckoning without me, and reckoning with me, are different things.”

This conversation took place after a most unpleasant lunch.  Julius had come to it in a fretful, hypercritical mood.  He had been calculating what his proposed changes would cost, and the sum total had given him a slight shock.  He was like many extravagant people, subject to passing spells of almost contemptible economy; and at that hour the proposed future outlay of thousands did not trouble him so much as the actual penny-half-penny value of his mother-in-law’s lunch.

He did not say so, but in some way the feeling permeated the table.  The widow pushed her plate aside, and sipped her glass of wine in silence.  Charlotte took a pettish pleasure in refusing what she felt she was unwelcome to.  Both left the table before Julius and Sophia had finished their meal; and both, as soon as they reached their rooms, turned to each other with faces hot with indignation, and hearts angry with a sense of shameful unkindness.

Charlotte spoke first.  “What is to be done, mother?  I cannot see you insulted, meal after meal, in this way.  Let us go at once.  I have told you it would come to this.  We ought to have moved immediately,—­just as soon as Julius came here as master.”

“My house in the village has been empty for three years.  It is cold and damp.  It needs attention of every kind.  If we could only stay here until Stephen’s house was finished:  then you could be married.”

“O mother dear, that is not possible!  You know Steve and I cannot marry until father has been dead at least a year.  It would be an insult to father to have a wedding in his mourning year.”

“If your father knows any thing, Charlotte, he knows the trouble we are in.  He would count it no insult.”

“But all through the Dales it would be a shame to us.  Steve and I would not like to begin life with the ill words or ill thoughts of our neighbors.”