The next moment her feelings seemed to overpower her—­“Oh yes, yes,” she cried, advancing “it is he himself—­the same dear, blessed likeness of the dead!” and casting her arms round the young gentleman’s neck, she wept long and profusely on his bosom.

Wilton was surprised and agitated, as may well be conceived.  He was not sufficiently ignorant of the world not to know that there are a thousand tricks and artifices daily practised, which assume such appearances as the scene now performing before him displayed.  He might, indeed, have entertained suspicions of all sorts of transformations and disguises; but there was an earnestness, a truth, in the lady’s manner that was in itself convincing, and there was something more, also—­there was a most extraordinary resemblance in her whole face and person to the picture which we have before mentioned in the house of the Earl of Sunbury.  The features were the same, the height, the figure:  the eyes were the same colour, there was the same peculiar expression about the mouth, and the only difference seemed to be the difference of age.  The picture represented a girl of eighteen or nineteen:  the person who stood beside him must have seen well nigh forty summers.

Though the likeness was complete, there was a certain difference.  Have we not all beheld a beautiful scene spread out in the morning light, full of radiance, and sparkling, and glorious sunshine? and have we not seen a grey cloud creep over the sky, leaving the landscape the sauce, but taking from it the resplendent beams in which it shone at first?  So did it seem with her.  All appeared the same as in the bright being whom the painter had depicted in her gay day of youth; but that Time had since brought, as it were, a grey shadow over the loveliness which it could not take away.

All these things took from Wilton every doubt; and after he had suffered the lady for a moment to give way to her feelings without a word:  even throwing his arm slightly round her, and pressing her towards him, he said, “Are you—­are you my mother?”

“Alas! no, my dear boy,” she replied, raising her head and wiping away the tears, while the colour rose slightly in her cheek.  “I am not your mother, but one who has loved you scarcely less than ever mother loved her son; one who nursed and fondled you in infancy; one who has now come from another land but for the sake of seeing you, and of holding once more to her heart the nursling of other years, even more sad and terrible than these.”

“From another land!” said Wilton, thoughtfully, while through the dim and misty vista of the past, strange figures seemed to move before his eyes, as if suddenly called up out of the darkness of oblivion by some enchanter’s voice.  “Another land!” he said, thoughtfully—­“Your face and your voice seem to wake strange memories.  I think, I remember having been with you in another land, and I recollect—­surely I recollect, a pretty cottage with a rose-tree at the door—­a rose-tree in full bloom; and tying the knot of an officer’s scarf, and his holding me long to his heart, and blessing me again and again—­”