It had been arranged that the marriage should take place early in spring. Ella wished to delay the event until the doubt as to the date of her uncle's death, and her own rightful inheritance of the property, should be cleared up; but Mr. Conroy urged that that was no good cause for delay.
"Suppose," she said to him one day, "that after we are married it should be discovered that I am not the true heiress, and Heron Dyke goes from me?"
"What then?" he answered. "We should still have enough for comfort. You possess some income that is indisputably your own; and I dare say I could match it, in one way or another."
"By that or other things. I have given up the newspapers for the present: am not sure that I shall take to them again. Be at rest, my dear, and trust to me. We shall be able to keep up a modest home, and a cow, and a pony-carriage. What more can we want?"
"No, indeed. I only wish you not to be troubled about this property. It may be yours, or it may not be."
"I fancy that if everybody possessed their legal rights, it would turn out to be at this moment Mr. Denison's. But we have yet no proof of that, and it may be that I am mistaken."
"The shortest way would be to give it up to him at once."
"My dear, Mr. Denison would not take it; he is one of the last men in the world to do so."
"I have seen him. I know that he is a straightforward, honourable man."
Ella sighed.. She wished the doubt could be solved.
Mr. Conroy wished the same, though perhaps in a less ardent way. It did not _trouble_ him as it did her; he was more patient, more reconciled to let time work out its own ends. He held a secret conviction that Aaron was at the bottom of the plot, if there had been a plot; but Conroy kept that impression to himself.
Harsh, crabbed and unsympathetic as was Aaron Stone, both by nature and training, the shock of his grandson's sudden death, following so soon after that of the Squire, had not failed to leave its traces behind. In a few short months Aaron seemed to have grown a dozen years older. His hair was thinner and whiter, he had become more feeble in his gait, and he claimed the assistance of a stick in walking more frequently than before. He maundered in an undertone to himself as he walked about the Hall with his keys--his chief duty now was to shut up the old house at night and to open it in the morning; he did little else; and he would often speak out aloud as in answer to some question when nobody had asked him one. He would have liked to follow his mistress about much as a faithful old mastiff might have done, gazing from the doors when she was in the grounds, moving restlessly about her chair at dinner. To Conroy he had taken umbrage, and would mutter to himself that a strange man had no business at Heron Dyke; the best of 'em were but spies.