The announcement of a lady who wished to see Mrs. Brookes caused the faithful old woman no particular emotion. She was well known and much respected among the neighbours of Poynings, in the humbler sense, and visits from several of their number were ordinary events enough in her life. The announcement found her, not in her own room, but in her mistress's, where she had replaced the portrait of George, and was sitting looking at it with dim eyes and clasped hands. The time had been long in rolling over her weary old head; for though she had passed the period of life in which feeling is very keen, and sorrow has power to torture, and constancy to last, Mrs. Brookes had no other objects to divide her thoughts with Mrs. Carruthers and her son; and day by day the old woman had brooded upon the new trouble which had come to those whom she loved so well. Perplexity mingled with her grief, for she knew not what to think. She had stoutly denied the possibility of George's guilt, in the memorable dialogue which had been the last she had held with his mother; but the faint and fluttering hope she entertained was very different from the confidence she expressed; and now, in the solitude and silence of the great house, in the absence of the absorbing demand which Mrs. Carruthers's condition had made upon all her attention and self-command, her stout old heart sank within her. His mother was gone away from all the scenes and associations which had come to have a terrible meaning. Would she ever return? Ellen hardly knew how she wished to answer this question. It were better and happier perhaps that she never did, that her tired heart should drowsily beat itself to rest in a strange country, and lie hidden under another soil than that her son had stained with blood. Had he done this thing? What of him? Where was he? The orderly house, the well-regulated household, needed little of the old housekeeper's supervision. The absence of the family made little difference. No cleaning-days interrupted the decorous order of things in an establishment in which it would have savoured of indecorum to suppose that the rule of absolute cleanliness was ever superseded. Alterations and repairs were innovating interruptions altogether incompatible with Poynings; and, in fact, there was little or nothing to break the dead level to which old Ellen had looked forward as that of her days when she should be left alone in the stately house, and which had begun to realize itself at once. Dixon had accompanied her mistress to foreign parts; and it was Martha, housemaid, who told Mrs. Brookes that a lady, who had been shown into her own room, wanted to see her. "Which, I dare say, she's come after Susan's character," remarked Martha, parenthetically, "for she ain't this side Hamherst, I know."