THAT was a very miserable day. I cannot fancy a more uncomfortable position for a stranger than that of being thrust into some distressing family secret, almost immediately after his or her introduction to the family in which it exists. This was just what had happened to me. I was kept one way or the other between those two sisters all the day. Aunt Milly kept continually appealing to me with her eyes, for conversation would not keep up its fluctuating and feeble existence in presence of that figure within the shelter of the screen; and my unlucky position of confidante must have been so apparent that I should not have wondered at any degree of dislike or displeasure which Miss Mortimer could have shown me. She did not show any, however; I could discern no signs of aversion to me. What am I saying? I could discern no signs of any human feeling whatever in her appearance and behaviour that day. My impression was that the sole thing with which her mind was occupied, was the effort to keep her head steady, and overcome the nervous, tremulous motion which agitated her frame. It was a relic, it might be an evidence, of some unseen tempest. But I am firmly convinced that this was the subject of all her thoughts. I watched, I must confess, with intense curiosity, though as quietly as possible, that she might not see I was watching her, every movement she made. But she did not notice me; she scarcely noticed anybody; she was careless of what other people were thinking; what she laboured after, all that miserable, lingering, rainy night was to get the command of herself. She never ventured to unbend her attitude in the slightest degree. She set her teeth together sometimes, and made her face look ghastly; but she could not keep down that external symptom of the trouble or tempest within. Her head kept moving with an incessant tremble; her hands were too much agitated to pursue their work. She kept the knitting-pins in her fingers, and held them rigidly together, as if she were knitting, and sometimes made a few convulsive stitches, and dropt them again, and bent in a tragical dismal confusion over that trifling occupation of hers, which had grown so weird{295} an adjunct of herself to me. I watched her with a certain horror and pity which I cannot describe. It was not her paltry wealth and lands she was defending; it was her honour and her life. There she sat a solitary desperate creature driven to bay, with dear Aunt Milly’s vague terrors and anxieties revolving about her; but conscious in herself of a misery and danger far transcending anything in her innocent sister’s thoughts. Life and honour! but I believed there was no way in this world to defend them but by unnatural falsehood, cruelty, and wrong, and that she did not shrink from these means of upholding herself. Perhaps even a virtuous struggle would have exercised less fascination, than the sight of that desperate guilty secret resistance. I could not keep my eyes from Miss Mortimer. There was something terrible to me in her convulsive efforts after stillness, and in the nervous motion which continually betrayed her, and which no exertions on her part could overcome.

But she sat out all the lengthy lingering hours of that evening, after dinner, for they departed from their usual customs at that time, and dined late out of compliment to Harry. We did try to talk a little, but Aunt Milly’s thoughts were all astray upon one subject, and she was continually breaking off in abrupt conclusions which irresistibly suggested the engrossing matter which she dared not enter upon. Miss Mortimer, meanwhile, attempted to read her Times; but whether it was that the rustle of the paper betrayed the trembling of her hands, or that her mind was unfit for reading anything, she soon laid the paper by, and resumed her pretence of working. You may suppose that Harry and I were not very much at our ease in this strange position of affairs. Almost everything that was said among us suggested a something which could not be said, yet which occupied everybody’s thoughts. Aunt Milly sat flushed and troubled opposite to her sister; her distressed perplexed look, the look of one totally at a loss and unable to offer any explanation even to herself; her glances, sometimes directing me to look at Miss Mortimer, sometimes appealing to me in vain for some suggestion which could throw light upon the subject, were enough of themselves to betray to any stranger the existence of some secret unhappiness in the house. Harry, who was not so much in Aunt Milly’s confidence as I was, kept appealing to me on the other side. What was it all about? I never wished so fervently for the conclusion of a day as I did for that; and yet there must be some extraordinary fascination in watching one’s fellow-creatures. I should not like to get{296} fairly into that dreadful inhuman occupation which people called studying character. But I was so curious about Miss Mortimer that I could almost have liked to follow her to her own room, and watch, when she was no longer on her guard against other people, how she would look and what she would do. Would she faint, or cry out, or dash herself against the floor? or was she so accustomed to that dreadful secresy that she would not betray herself even to herself? She must have lived that dreadful hidden life, and locked up all she knew in her own breast for a lifetime; for a longer lifetime than mine.

“I wonder,” said Henry, when we were alone that evening, “what sort of a person this Miss Mortimer is. Something’s wrong clearly. I suspect there must be something in the old lady’s life which will not bear the light of day.”

“What makes you think so?” said I.

“The t’other old lady and you play into each other’s hands,” cried Harry; “you know more about it than you choose to tell. But of course you are right enough if it is somebody else’s secret; only recollect, Milly, I am very glad you should be an heiress; ............