llinger before I started. But now, how is the
widow?"

"Getting calmer," said Deronda. "She seems to be escaping the bodily
illness that one might have feared for her, after her plunge and
terrible excitement. Her uncle and mother came two days ago, and she is
being well taken care of."

"Any prospect of an heir being born?"

"From what Mr. Gascoigne said to me, I conclude not. He spoke as if it
were a question whether the widow would have the estates for her life."

"It will not be much of a wrench to her affections, I fancy, this loss
of the husband?" said Sir Hugo, looking round at Deronda.

"The suddenness of the death has been a great blow to her," said
Deronda, quietly evading the question.

"I wonder whether Grandcourt gave her any notion what were the
provisions of his will?" said Sir Hugo.

"Do you know what they are, sir?" parried Deronda.

"Yes, I do," said the baronet, quickly. "Gad! if there is no prospect
of a legitimate heir, he has left everything to a boy he had by a Mrs.
Glasher; you know nothing about the affair, I suppose, but she was a
sort of wife to him for a good many years, and there are three older
children--girls. The boy is to take his father's name; he is Henleigh
already, and he is to be Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt. The Mallinger
will be of no use to him, I am happy to say; but the young dog will
have more than enough with his fourteen years' minority--no need to
have had holes filled up with my fifty thousand for Diplow that he had
no right to: and meanwhile my beauty, the young widow, is to put up
with a poor two thousand a year and the house at Gadsmere--a nice kind
of banishment for her if she chose to shut herself up there, which I
don't think she will. The boy's mother has been living there of late
years. I'm perfectly disgusted with Grandcourt. I don't know that I'm
obliged to think the better of him because he's drowned, though, so far
as my affairs are concerned, nothing in his life became him like the
leaving it."

"In my opinion he did wrong when he married this wife--not in leaving
his estates to the son," said Deronda, rather dryly.

"I say nothing against his leaving the land to the lad," said Sir Hugo;
"but since he had married this girl he ought to have given her a
handsome provision, such as she could live on in a style fitted to the
rank he had raised her to. She ought to have had four or five thousand
a year and the London house for her life; that's what I s