“I shall stay with him—­till he desires me to go away.  He asked me to stay and that is quite enough.”  Then she got up and left the room with more dignity;—­as also she had spoken with more earnestness,—­than Mrs. Morton had given her credit for possessing.  After that the two ladies did not meet again till the next day.

CHAPTER IV

The two old Ladies

On the next morning Mrs. Morton did not come down to breakfast, but sat alone upstairs nursing her wrath.  During the night she had made up her mind to one or two things.  She would never enter her grandson’s chambers when Lady Ushant was there.  She would not speak to Reginald Morton, and should he come into her presence while she was at Bragton she would leave the room.  She would do her best to make the house, in common parlance, “too hot” to hold that other woman.  And she would make use of those words which John had spoken concerning Chowton Farm as a peg on which she might hang her discourse in reference to his will.  If in doing all this she should receive that dutiful assistance which she thought that he owed her,—­then she should stand by his bed-side, and be tender to him, and nurse him to the last as a mother would nurse a child.  But if, as she feared, he were headstrong in disobeying, then she would remember that her duty to her family, if done with a firm purpose, would have lasting results, while his life might probably be an affair of a few weeks,—­or even days.

At about eleven Lady Ushant was with her patient when a message was brought by Mrs. Hopkins.  Mrs. Morton wished to see her grandson and desired to know whether it would suit him that she should come now.  “Why not?” said the sick man, who was sitting up in his bed.  Then Lady Ushant collected her knitting and was about to depart.  “Must you go because she is coming?” Morton asked.  Lady Ushant, shocked at the necessity of explaining to him the ill feeling that existed, said that perhaps it would be best.  “Why should it be best?” Lady Ushant shook her head, and smiled, and put her hand upon the counterpane,—­and retired.  As she passed the door of her rival’s room she could see the black silk dress moving behind the partly open door, and as she entered her own she heard Mrs. Morton’s steps upon the corridor.  The place was already almost “too hot” for her.  Anything would be better than scenes like this in the house of a dying man.

“Need my aunt have gone away?” he asked after the first greeting.

“I did not say so.”

“She seemed to think that she was not to stay.”

“Can I help what she thinks, John?” Of course she feels that she is—­”

“Is what?”

“An interloper—­if I must say it”

“But I have sent for her, and I have begged her to stay.”

“Of course she can stay if she wishes.  But, dear John, there must be much to be said between you and me which,—­which cannot interest her; or which, at least, she ought not to hear.”  He did not contradict this in words, feeling himself to be too weak, for contest; but within his own mind he declared that it was not so.  The things which interested him now were as likely to interest his great-aunt as his grandmother, and to be as fit for the ears of the one as for those of the other.