On the other hand the result had been to return Lady Burdon to the Mount Street life with at least a temporary stop put to the Maxwell whinings and at least a lighter drain from the Mount Street expenses.
Miss Oxford had not seen her on either of these visits. Miss Oxford had only smiled in an odd way when she heard of the behaviour that had set the countryside clacking. The better Lady Burdon flourished, the more Lady Burdon exercised the prerogatives of her usurped position, the riper she ripened for the blow, when there should be returned to her the son whose mother she had murdered; that was the entertainment Miss Oxford nursed through these years, living so gently and so quietly, "thinking" so much, poor dear.
"Strange-like?" "Silly-like?" Or dreadfully sane? For Miss Oxford's own part, she knew only one thing of her mental condition. At very rare intervals there seized her a state that was related to and that recalled the tremendous pressure in her brain when she had knelt, consumed with hate and desire for vengeance, by Audrey's death-bed. It took the form of a sudden violent fluttering in her brain, as though a live, winged thing were beating there, beating to be free. The pressure that came by Audrey's death-bed had ended in a snap--in something giving that left her extraordinarily, tinglingly calm, possessed by the plan and certainty of revenge to be taken by Audrey's son--one day. The fluttering, the winglike beating ended of its own volition, and outside any command she could put upon it--sweeping up all her senses in its beating, only leaving to her the terror that it would end--in what? Sometimes it came in just the tiniest flutter, without cause and gone as soon as come, just arresting her and frightening her like a swift shoot of pain in a nerve. Sometimes in the briefest flutter but with cause; such a case had been when Percival told her of his meeting with the Burdons and she had caused him to exclaim by clutching his hand. Once of much longer duration and of new effect, and with revelation to her of the end it threatened. That was when, a few days ago, she had stood alone with Percival in the great hall of Burdon Old Manor. It was the fluttering that had bade her make him put on his cap and cry 'I hold!' and she had been informed that if it did not stop--if it did not stop!--if it did not stop! she would scream out her secret--run through the house and cry to all that Lady Burdon was--