f years. As a compromise, however, to meet some
of my objections, it was also arranged that she should keep her rooms in
Gower Street, and come to town for a week once in each month; of course,
also, she would leave Roughborough for the greater part of the holidays.
After two years, the thing was to come to an end, unless it proved a
great success. She should by that time, at any rate, have made up her
mind what the boy's character was, and would then act as circumstances
might determine.

The pretext she put forward ostensibly was that her doctor said she ought
to be a year or two in the country after so many years of London life,
and had recommended Roughborough on account of the purity of its air, and
its easy access to and from London--for by this time the railway had
reached it. She was anxious not to give her brother and sister any right
to complain, if on seeing more of her nephew she found she could not get
on with him, and she was also anxious not to raise false hopes of any
kind in the boy's own mind.

Having settled how everything was to be, she wrote to Theobald and said
she meant to take a house in Roughborough from the Michaelmas then
approaching, and mentioned, as though casually, that one of the
attractions of the place would be that her nephew was at school there and
she should hope to see more of him than she had done hitherto.

Theobald and Christina knew how dearly Alethea loved London, and thought
it very odd that she should want to go and live at Roughborough, but they
did not suspect that she was going there solely on her nephew's account,
much less that she had thought of making Ernest her heir. If they had
guessed this, they would have been so jealous that I half believe they
would have asked her to go and live somewhere else. Alethea however, was
two or three years younger than Theobald; she was still some years short
of fifty, and might very well live to eighty-five or ninety; her money,
therefore, was not worth taking much trouble about, and her brother and
sister-in-law had dismissed it, so to speak, from their minds with costs,
assuming, however, that if anything did happen to her while they were
still alive, the money would, as a matter of course, come to them.

The prospect of Alethea seeing much of Ernest was a serious matter.
Christina smelt mischief from afar, as indeed she often did. Alethea was
worldly--as worldly, that is to say, as a sister of Theobald's could be.
In her l