CHAPTER V. CURED. The chief feeling that I experienced when I came to review the events of that evening, was, that my unexpected encounter with Cave Charteris seemed to have dragged my mother out of her grave again. Until that moment I had believed that, little by little, I was learning to bear my great loss with hope and patience, if not with cheerful resignation. I had begun to think of my darling as in another and better world than this—if not actually in heaven, at least amongst the redeemed, willing to wait the moment of her perfection, and entirely separated from all earthly pain and trouble. I had commenced to lose sense of the waking nightmare that had haunted me for so many weeks after her funeral; of the sight of the dead pinched face under the shrouding sheet; the waxen hands folded stiffly on her sunken breast; and over it all those horrid heavy clods of clay, the rattle of which upon her coffin lid would echo in my heart, I verily believed, until they fell upon my own. I felt the loss of her counsel, her companionship, and her love as keenly—perhaps more keenly than when I had been first deprived of them; but I thought that time had cured me of the terrible human anguish with which I had laid her in the grave. But now it was all revived. The sight of Cave Charteris had brought it back again; brought back the memory of her maternal interest in him, her confidence in his affection for me, and her self-reproach when we discovered that his attentions meant nothing, that she had not better guarded her one ewe lamb from the deceitfulness of the world. I sat down in my room, and tried to disentangle my thoughts from my present position and cast them back to that period when Mr. Charteris had been so intimate with us at Norwood, and to see if my riper judgment could acquit him of having wantonly played with my affections. But I remembered it all too plainly, and I could find no excuse for his behaviour. He had not had the plea of extreme youth to exonerate his want of thought. He was five-and-twenty, and I nineteen. He must have known in what light his persistent intimacy would have been accepted by my mother and myself. Besides, though he had never mentioned the subject of marriage, he had told me, over and over again, that he loved me, and hinted in every possible way at the probability of a future spent together.