," said Brooke as they
sat at their dinners, "because in this way we can talk over the dear
old woman at Exeter. Yes, our fellow does make good soup, and it's
about all that he does do well. As for getting a potato properly
boiled, that's quite out of the question. Yes, it is a good glass
of sherry. I told you we'd a fairish tap of sherry on. Well, I was
there, backwards and forwards, for nearly six weeks."

"And how did you get on with the old woman?"

"Like a house on fire," said Brooke.

"She didn't quarrel with you?"

"No,--upon the whole she did not. I always felt that it was touch
and go. She might or she might not. Every now and then she looked at
me, and said a sharp word, as though it was about to come. But I had
determined when I went there altogether to disregard that kind of
thing."

"It's rather important to you,--is it not?"

"You mean about her money?"

"Of course, I mean about her money," said Stanbury.

"It is important;--and so it was to you."

"Not in the same degree, or nearly so. And as for me, it was not on
the cards that we shouldn't quarrel. I am so utterly a Bohemian in
all my ideas of life, and she is so absolutely the reverse, that not
to have quarrelled would have been hypocritical on my part or on
hers. She had got it into her head that she had a right to rule
my life; and, of course, she quarrelled with me when I made her
understand that she should do nothing of the kind. Now, she won't
want to rule you."

"I hope not."

"She has taken you up," continued Stanbury, "on altogether a
different understanding. You are to her the representative of a
family to whom she thinks she owes the restitution of the property
which she enjoys. I was simply a member of her own family, to which
she owes nothing. She thought it well to help one of us out of what
she regarded as her private purse, and she chose me. But the matter
is quite different with you."

"She might have given everything to you, as well as to me," said
Brooke.

"That's not her idea. She conceives herself bound to leave all she
has back to a Burgess, except anything she may save,--as she says,
off her own back, or out of her own belly. She has told me so a score
of times."

"And what did you say?"

"I always told her that, let her do as she would, I should never ask
any question about her will."

"But she hates us all like poison,--except me," said Brooke. "I never
knew people so absurdly hostile as are your aunt and