Having settled how everything was to be, she wrote to Theobald and said
she meant to take a house in Roughborough from the Michaelmas then
approaching, and mentioned, as though casually, that one of the
attractions of the place would be that her nephew was at school there and
she should hope to see more of him than she had done hitherto.
Theobald and Christina knew how dearly Alethea loved London, and thought
it very odd that she should want to go and live at Roughborough, but they
did not suspect that she was going there solely on her nephew's account,
much less that she had thought of making Ernest her heir. If they had
guessed this, they would have been so jealous that I half believe they
would have asked her to go and live somewhere else. Alethea however, was
two or three years younger than Theobald; she was still some years short
of fifty, and might very well live to eighty-five or ninety; her money,
therefore, was not worth taking much trouble about, and her brother and
sister-in-law had dismissed it, so to speak, from their minds with costs,
assuming, however, that if anything did happen to her while they were
still alive, the money would, as a matter of course, come to them.
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