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“Or rather, your children. That girl Sarah. When you came here last summer, she sat upon that stool and told me an entire story about a whale that lived in the Thames, and I laughed until I had a pain. Nobody had made me laugh for thirty years. I did not know that I could.”

“She is very fond of you.”

“It is her nature. But yes, I do think she is fond of me.” She sighed, and her hand moved, upon the coverlet, in a small restless way.

She died on the fourteenth. Her children were at the bedside, in the still dark of the winter morning, when the old woman, who had been asleep for some hours, opened her eyes, and looked at Edward, giving him a small, brief smile. After which she closed her eyes, and it was some time before either of them perceived that she had stopped breathing.

The will was read upon the twenty-first, in the great drawing-room in Park Street, by a small dry gentleman from Lincoln’s Inn named Mr. Gilchrist, who had a pair of steel spectacles, and a genius for making the disposal of a large sum of money sound like a recital of the multiplication table.

They sat in a half-circle, and every person in it was in black. Mr. Robert Ferrars sat by the fire in a state of exquisite grief, with a handkerchief bordered with black an inch deep, and his quizzing-glass laid upon his knee; his wife, in a gown of black crape with jet trimmings, beside him, with her eyes fixed upon the lawyer’s face, and a look of such patient, gentle, self-effacing sorrow that a stranger must have wept. On the other side, in the second row, sat John Dashwood and his wife, Fanny, thin and pale and elegant, in a very large bonnet; and at the end, upon two of the hardest chairs in the room, side by side, in a plain black bombazine and a black coat that had been turned, were Edward, and Elinor.

“I, Augusta Ferrars, widow, of Park Street,” read Mr. Gilchrist, in his dry, flat voice, “being of sound mind —

“To my son Edward, the sum of ten thousand pounds, out of the portion which I brought to my late husband upon our marriage, and which I have never yielded to the entail: together with his father’s gold repeater watch, and his father’s seal-ring, and the little walnut writing-desk that stood in his study, and his father’s own copy of the poems of Cowper, with the marginal notes.”

There was a very small stir in the room.

“To each of the two daughters of my son Edward,” the lawyer read on, “the sum of two thousand pounds; to my granddaughters, Mary and Sarah, to be paid upon their marriage, or their attaining the age of five-and-twenty, whichever shall first occur, and to be their own, and not subject to any husband’s control; and four thousand pounds to my grandson Edward, upon his attaining the age of one-and-twenty. To my granddaughter Mary, my garnet brooch, and to my granddaughter Sarah, my sapphire ring, which they shall wear upon their wedding day. To my daughter-in-law Elinor, the pearls that were my mother’s, which I desire that she will wear upon Sundays, and a letter which shall be delivered to her by Mr. Gilchrist.”

“Pearls,” said Fanny Dashwood, in a stifled voice.

She had sat perfectly upright, with her gloved hands clasped upon her reticule, through the whole of the reading, in an attitude of such extreme composure that one might have believed she had been carved; but it appeared that there is a point at which even the best-bred marble will crack.

“To my daughter Fanny,” said Mr. Gilchrist, turning another page, “my diamond necklace, and the emerald ear-drops which were given me by my late husband, and the cameo set which was my mother’s mother’s, in recognition of the affection which she has borne me. To the son of my daughter, Fanny, Harry, the sum of four thousand pounds upon his attaining the age of one-and-twenty.”

“And the whole residue of my estate, of what nature soever, real and personal, together with the lease of the house in Park Street, and all the furniture and plate therein, I give and bequeath to my son Robert, and to his wife, Lucy, jointly, for their lives and to the survivor; and after them to their children. Included are several pieces of jewellery, from which the children of Robert — Georgiana, Honoria, and Annabelle — shall each choose a piece, to be worn on their wedding days.”

He folded the paper.

“That is the whole,” said Mr. Gilchrist.

Robert Ferrars had gone the colour of a fine claret and was pressing his black-bordered handkerchief to his eyes with a gesture so delicate, and so infinitely tender, that it was not perhaps observed by anyone save his wife that he had allowed the corner of it to lift, and had taken, over the top, a very quick, very complete look at the lawyer’s face. Lucy put one small plump hand upon her husband’s arm, in an attitude of comforting sympathy; and if there was, upon her round pink face, a light so soft and so brilliant, so like the glow of a woman who has been informed that all her prayers are answered, that one could have read it across the room, it was gone in an instant, and replaced by tears.

“Dear Mamma,” said Lucy. “So generous. I never — Robert, my love, I never could have expected it —”

“I had rather it had been nothing,” said Robert, faintly, “than to be deprived of her.”

“Pearls,” said Fanny again, in a dreadful, level, murmuring voice, to nobody. “They belonged to my grandmother. And she has left them to a curate’s wife.”

Edward raised a finger and corrected, “Rector’s wife.”

“I am sure that it is a great comfort to dear Elinor,” said Lucy, turning upon her a look of such melting compassion that Fanny, who had been about to say something else, closed her mouth. “She has so few things. It is very sweet of Mamma.” She pressed the hand of her sister-in-law.

The letter was given to Elinor by the lawyer, in the small back parlour, in a black-edged envelope, sealed with a plain wafer; and she read it, standing at the window, with her back to the room, while her husband stood behind her.

My dear Elinor, it said.

I have left you the pearls because they are all I have that are plain; they were my mother’s. She said to me when I married that the only useful thing about a pearl is that it can be worn by a woman who has nothing else. I did not understand her. I do now. I believe they would be most appropriate if you were to wear them on Sundays.

There is one thing more. The money that I have left your children is for themselves. I have taken very great care that no person shall be able to touch it. A daughter with a portion of her own is never obliged to marry a man she does not like, and I should not like it to be said, by anybody, that a child of Edward’s was married for anything but herself.

Your affectionate mother, A. F.

Robert and Lucy and their daughters moved into the great house at the beginning of the second year. It was a place suited to their station. They said “we” a great deal. They were very particular about who was to be called upon. They were seen at the Opera in a new box, and at Almack’s. Georgiana was pronounced to be a pretty, well-behaved, well-connected girl, and Honoria a little too clever; and it was noticed by the whole of their acquaintance that they had become, in their tastes, in their opinions, and in their manners of address, a good deal more distinguished than they had been.

The friendship of Mrs. Robert Ferrars and Mrs. John Dashwood, which had always been extremely cordial, ripened over the next years into something that could only have been described, by an impartial observer, as a very perfect harmony.

They were, in a great many respects, exactly suited. They shared, in the first place, a horror of poverty, which each of them had, at different periods of her life, been in a position to observe at a distance; and they shared, in the second, an unshakeable conviction that a well-bred woman had a duty to know everything that was going on.