Her mother’s rooms had never been opened by any one but Christian Harefield since his return to the Water House after that last fatal journey. There was something ghostly in the idea of those three rooms facing the river, those three locked doors in the long oak gallery. Beatrix passed those sealed doors always with a thrill of pain. If her mother had but lived, how different life would have been for her! There would have been sorrow perhaps, for she knew there had been sorrow in the last year of her mother’s life, but they two would have shared it. They would have clung to each other closer, loved each other more fondly because of the husband and father’s unkindness. ‘What would papa matter to me if I had mamma?’ she thought. ‘He would be only a gloomy person coming in and out, like the dark brief night which comes in and out among the summer days. We should not have minded him. We should have accepted him as a part of nature, the shadow that made our sunshine brighter.’ Often and often she sat upon a bench on the river terrace, leaning back with her arms folded above her head, looking up at those seven blank windows, darkly shuttered, three windows for the spacious old bedroom, one for the narrow dressing closet, three for the pretty morning-room which she remembered dimly, a white panelled room, with pale blue curtains all worked with birds and flowers in many coloured silks, black and gold Japanese cabinets, a tall chimney-piece with a curious old looking-glass above it, let into the wall, pictures, and red and blue china jars, a faint odour of pot pourri, a piano, a frame for Berlin woolwork, with a group of unfinished roses that never seemed to grow any bigger. ‘Dear room,’ she said, ‘to think that I should live so near you, pass your door every day, and yet remember you so faintly, as if you were a dream!’ Once a curious fancy flashed upon her as she sat in the evening glow, looking up at those windows. ‘Perhaps Antonio’s picture is in that room.’ She could just recollect a miniature in a velvet case, which she had opened one day, the picture of a gentleman. She had only glanced at it, when her mother took the case from her and put it away. The complexion was more beautiful than Antonio’s, supposing the gentleman who sang the church music to have been Antonio; but people’s complexions in portraits are generally superior to the reality. * * * * * Kind as her friends at the Vicarage were, Beatrix never talked of these old memories. The past was a sealed book. Not for worlds could she have spoken of it--not even to Bella, with whom she conversed as freely, in a general way, as a little girl talks to her doll.