In the same spirit of kindness, Mrs. Shaw journeyed to Milton, occasionally dreading the first meeting, and wondering how it would be got over; but more frequently planning how soon she could get Margaret away from ‘that horrid place,’ and back into the pleasant comforts of Harley Street.

‘Oh dear!’ she said to her maid; ’look at those chimneys!  My poor sister Hale!  I don’t think I could have rested at Naples, if I had known what it was!  I must have come and fetched her and Margaret away.’  And to herself she acknowledged, that she had always thought her brother-in-law rather a weak man, but never so weak as now, when she saw for what a place he had exchanged the lovely Helstone home.

Margaret had remained in the same state; white, motionless, speechless, tearless.  They had told her that her aunt Shaw was coming; but she had not expressed either surprise or pleasure, or dislike to the idea.  Mr. Bell, whose appetite had returned, and who appreciated Dixon’s endeavours to gratify it, in vain urged upon her to taste some sweetbreads stewed with oysters; she shook her head with the same quiet obstinacy as on the previous day; and he was obliged to console himself for her rejection, by eating them all himself But Margaret was the first to hear the stopping of the cab that brought her aunt from the railway station.  Her eyelids quivered, her lips coloured and trembled.  Mr. Bell went down to meet Mrs. Shaw; and when they came up, Margaret was standing, trying to steady her dizzy self; and when she saw her aunt, she went forward to the arms open to receive her, and first found the passionate relief of tears on her aunt’s shoulder.  All thoughts of quiet habitual love, of tenderness for years, of relationship to the dead,—­all that inexplicable likeness in look, tone, and gesture, that seem to belong to one family, and which reminded Margaret so forcibly at this moment of her mother,—­came in to melt and soften her numbed heart into the overflow of warm tears.

Mr. Bell stole out of the room, and went down into the study, where he ordered a fire, and tried to divert his thoughts by taking down and examining the different books.  Each volume brought a remembrance or a suggestion of his dead friend.  It might be a change of employment from his two days’ work of watching Margaret, but it was no change of thought.  He was glad to catch the sound of Mr. Thornton’s voice, making enquiry at the door.  Dixon was rather cavalierly dismissing him; for with the appearance of Mrs. Shaw’s maid, came visions of former grandeur, of the Beresford blood, of the ‘station’ (so she was pleased to term it) from which her young lady had been ousted, and to which she was now, please God, to be restored.  These visions, which she had been dwelling on with complacency in her conversation with Mrs. Shaw’s maid (skilfully eliciting meanwhile all the circumstances of state and consequence connected with the Harley Street establishment, for the edification of the listening Martha), made Dixon rather inclined to be supercilious in her treatment of any inhabitant of Milton; so, though she always stood rather in awe of Mr. Thornton, she was as curt as she durst be in telling him that he could see none of the inmates of the house that night.  It was rather uncomfortable to be contradicted in her statement by Mr. Bell’s opening the study-door, and calling out: