With this Mrs Outhouse was obliged to be content.  The letter was gone, and could not be stopped.  Nor, indeed, had any authority been delegated to her by which she would have been justified in stopping it.  She could only join her husband in wishing that they both might be relieved, as soon as possible, from the terrible burden which had been thrown upon them.  ‘I call it very hard,’ said Mr Outhouse ’very hard, indeed.  If we were to desire them to leave the house, everybody would cry out upon us for our cruelty; and yet, while they remain here, they will submit themselves to no authority.  As far as I can see, they may, both of them, do just what they please, and we can’t stop it.’

CHAPTER LIV

MR GIBSON’S THREAT

Miss Stanbury for a long time persisted in being neither better nor worse.  Sir Peter would not declare her state to be precarious, nor would he say that she was out of danger; and Mr Martin had been so utterly prostrated by the nearly-fatal effects of his own mistake that he was quite unable to rally himself and talk on the subject with any spirit or confidence.  When interrogated he would simply reply that Sir Peter said this and Sir Peter said that, and thus add to, rather than diminish, the doubt, and excitement, and varied opinion which prevailed through the city.  On one morning it was absolutely asserted within the limits of the Close that Miss Stanbury was dying, and it was believed for half a day at the bank that she was then lying in articulo mortis.  There had got about, too, a report that a portion of the property had only been left to Miss Stanbury for her life, that the Burgesses would be able to reclaim the houses in the city, and that a will had been made altogether in favour of Dorothy, cutting out even Brooke from any share in the inheritance; and thus Exeter had a good deal to say respecting the affairs and state of health of our old friend.  Miss Stanbury’s illness, however, was true enough.  She was much too ill to hear anything of what was going on, too ill to allow Martha to talk to her at all about the outside public.  When the invalid herself would ask questions about the affairs of the world, Martha would be very discreet and turn away from the subject.  Miss Stanbury, for instance, ill as she was, exhibited a most mundane interest, not exactly in Camilla French’s marriage, but in the delay which that marriage seemed destined to encounter.  ‘I dare say he’ll slip out of it yet,’ said the sick lady to her confidential servant.  Then Martha had thought it right to change the subject, feeling it to be wrong that an old lady on her death-bed should be taking joy in the disappointment of her young neighbour.  Martha changed the subject, first to jelly, and then to the psalms of the day.  Miss Stanbury was too weak to resist; but the last verse of the last psalm of the evening had hardly been finished before she remarked that she would never believe it till she saw it.  ’It’s all in the hands of Him as is on high, mum,’ said Martha, turning her eyes up to the ceiling, and closing the book at the same time, with a look strongly indicative of displeasure.