With what pride she showed me how she had kept everything!  Then she left me alone, standing in the little drawing-room.  It seemed so wonderfully small to me now.  The pieces of brocade still hid the magenta “suite,” but arranged with a prim stiffness they lacked in our day.  Dear Hephzibah!  She had been dusting them, and would not fold them up and put them away in case that I should ever come.

The china all stood as it used, and grandmamma’s chair with her footstool, and the little table near it with her magnifying-glass and spectacle-case.  There were her books, the old French classics, and the modern yellow backs, her paper-knife still in one, half-cut.  I never realized how happy I had been here, in this little room, a year ago.  How happy, and, oh, how ridiculously young!  My work-box stood in its usual place, a bit of fine embroidery protruding from its lid.

For the first time in my life I sat down in grandmamma’s chair.  Oh, if something of her spirit could descend upon me!  I tried to think of her maxims, her wonderful courage, her cheerfulness in all adversities, her wit, her gayety.  I seemed a paltry, feeble creature daring to sit there, in her bergere, and sigh at fate.  No, I would grumble no more.  I, too, would be of the race.

How long I mused there I do not know.  The fire was burning low.

I went up to my own old room, I must see everything, now I was here.  It struck me with a freezing chill as I opened the door.  The fire had not drawn here, and lay a mass of smouldering sticks and paper in the narrow grate.

There was my little white bed, cold and narrow.  The dressing-table, with its muslin flounces and cheap, white-bordered mirror.  Even the china tray was there, where, I remember, my jewels lay the night before my wedding, and close beside it, the red-morroco case Antony’s present had come in—­left behind, by mistake, I suppose, when the other gifts were packed away.  The note he had written me with it was still in its lid.

The paper felt icy to touch.  I pulled it out and read it to the end.  Then I threw it in the fire.  The sullen, charred sticks had not life enough to burn it.  I lit a match and watched the bright flames curl up the chimney until all was destroyed.  Then I fled.  Here at least in the cottage I will never come again.  The room is full of ghosts.

On the whole, however, my visit did me good.  I returned to Ledstone with a firm determination to be more like grandmamma.

A telegram was awaiting me from Augustus, sent from his first stopping-place.  He had caught the measles, it appeared.  The measles!  I thought only children got the measles.

Poor Augustus!  He would make a bad patient.  I was truly sorry, and sent the most affectionate and sympathetic answer I could think of to meet him at St. Helena.

I wrote to the war office, asking them please to send me any further news when they received it.  But the measles!  It almost made me laugh.