CHAPTER VII
Two mornings after the day on which Lord Brayton had lunched, the unexpected and the dreadful happened. The tenant who had intended to take the Miss Grimsons' house for September died suddenly, and since it was extremely unlikely that another occupant would spring up, mushroom-like, Aunt Cathie spoke sound common-sense when she said, "We might as well go to Littlestone now as not, instead of grilling like beefsteaks."
It was at breakfast on a singularly hot morning when she made this pronouncement. Aunt Elizabeth really agreed with her—in fact, she intended to go immediately, whatever Catherine said, but she was so constituted that she had to object. She also took the fact of their intended tenant's death as a personal insult to her, levelled at her by a malignant power of some kind. It had hit its mark, too; she was grossly affronted.
"Of course, you will do as you like, Catherine," she said, "but I only beg of you not to lay it up to me, if we are all in the workhouse before Christmas. We have taken Sea View Cottage, as it is, for September, and we shall have to pay the rent of it till the end of the month, unless we conveniently die also. If we go now, it will make another fortnight. And more board wages."
Aunt Catherine went through some slow arithmetical processes in her mind, and while she was yet silent the fire kindled in Aunt Elizabeth, and she attacked, as if running amuck, everything within sight. Indeed, she attacked what was not within sight also.
"It is the third morning that Lucia has both missed prayers and not come down yet," she said. "I wonder you can sleep at night, Catherine, in the way you do, for if I heard you snoring once last night, it would be false if I said you didn't wake me up a dozen times, with the thought of how you spoil the girl, filling her head with all sorts of notions of marrying into other stations"
90
