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
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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