So full was Grace of the seriousness of this thought, that she replied, without taking any notice of that guilty laugh, only by an inclination of her head: “We will have to learn all about the English laws, and how things are managed, for Lenny’s sake,” she said seriously. “He will be a magistrate, you know, and most likely in Parliament; and he will be rather behind by losing so much time in Canada. We will have to coach him up.”
“Oh but, Gracie, I don’t know things myself; I never was able to do that.”
“I must begin directly,” said Grace with a little sigh--the sigh of the self-devoted. “It was such a business--don’t you remember, Milly?--to coach him for school; and England--England is a great deal more difficult. I think I must begin Greek directly, and law--or he will never know his lessons. I hope mamma will see that it is her duty, Milly, to come at once,” she added still more seriously. Milly for one second was inclined to laugh again at the portentous and preposterous importance of her young brother, but then she recollected herself, and the tears filled her eyes.
“Oh, poor mamma!” she cried, “poor mamma! to come now!”
This turned once more the current of their thoughts. But when they got back to their hotel the argument was resumed: for it soon became an argument maintained with great heat on one side, with an unimaginable gentle obstinacy on the other. Milly, who never went against her sister’s will, was for once in opposition, and though she was not strong enough to subdue Grace, she did not yield to her.
They had begun languidly and mournfully to arrange their father’s papers in the morning. Now Grace betook herself to this pursuit with passion. She found nothing: some fragments of torn letters, torn up into very small pieces, on one of which the name of “Anna” occurred, lay in the bottom of his dressing bag; but Grace was not sufficiently skilled in the art of detection to join them together as a more experienced investigator might have done. And it revolted her to pry into what the dead man had thus wished to conceal. In all his other stores there was not a word which even suggested any information. He had scrawled, “3 Grove Road,” on a page of his blotting-paper, and twice over in other places, as if afraid of forgetting it. When she came to a little diary he had kept she paused with a sensation of awe. She had seen it a hundred times--had seen it lying open, and knew that no special sanctity was attributed to it. It was nothing but a little record of events and engagements; but when the hand is still that has scribbled these careless memoranda, how strangely their character changes! She took it to where Milly sat, and placed herself on the sofa beside her. “I cannot read this by myself,” she said.