“Oh, mem!” cried Gilchrist--“oh, my dear leddy, that has been more to me than a’ this world! Is it for me to say that it’s no’ justice we have to expect, for we deserve nothing; and that the Lord knows His ain reasons; and that the time will come when we’ll get it all back--you, your bairn, the Lord bless him! and me to see ye as happy as the angels, which is all I ever wanted or thought to get either here or otherwhere!” CHAPTER XX. There was nothing more said to Mr. Mannering on the subject of Mr. Templar’s mission, neither did he himself say anything, either to sanction or prevent his child from carrying out the strange desire of her mother--her mother! Dora did not accept the thought. She made a struggle within herself to keep up the fiction that it was her mother’s sister--a relation, something near, yet ever inferior to the vision of a benignant, melancholy being, unknown, which a dead mother so often is to an imaginative girl. It pleased her to find, as she said to herself, “no likeness” to the suffering and hysterical woman she had seen, in that calm, pensive portrait, which she instantly secured and took possession of--the little picture which had lain so long buried with its face downward in the secret drawer. She gazed at it for an hour together, and found nothing--nothing, she declared to herself with indignant satisfaction, to remind her of the other face--flushed, weeping, middle-aged--which had so implored her affection. Had it been her mother, was it possible that it should have required an effort to give that affection? No! Dora at sixteen believed very fully in the voice of nature. It would have been impossible, her heart at once would have spoken, she would have known by some infallible instinct. She put the picture up in her own room, and filled her heart with the luxury, the melancholy, the sadness, and pleasure of this possession--her mother’s portrait, more touching to the imagination than any other image could be. But then there began to steal a little shadow over Dora’s thoughts. She would not give up her determined resistance to the idea that this face and the other face, living and dying, which she had seen, could be one; but when she raised her eyes suddenly, to her mother’s picture, a consciousness would steal over her, an involuntary glance of recognition. What more likely than that there should be a resemblance, faint and far away, between sister and sister? And then there came to be a gleam of reproach to Dora in those eyes, and the girl began to feel as if there was an irreverence, a want of feeling, in turning that long recluse and covered face to the light of day, and carrying on all the affairs of life under it, as if it were a common thing. Finally she arranged over it a little piece of drapery, a morsel of faded embroidered silk which was among her treasures, soft and faint in its colours--a veil which she could draw in her moments of thinking and quiet, those moments which it would not be