Then she went up with some shrinking, feeling like a sea-bather making the first plunge, into the drawing-room, which no one had used for the last five years. She was obliged to confess that it was very pretty, notwithstanding that it frightened her. She half expected some one to rise from the chair before the first newly-lighted October fire to receive her as she went in. The little cabinets, the pretty brackets for the china, the scraps of old lace upon the velvet, the glimmer of old, dim, picturesque mirrors, the subdued yet brilliant colour in the bits of tapestry, all moved her to admiration. At Sunninghill they had, as became a lady’s house, many pretty things, but with as little idea of art as it is possible in the present day to succeed in having. Miss Cherry knew nothing of art; and it had been invented, Miss Charity thought, since her days, which was the time when people liked to have respectable solid furniture, and did not understand æsthetics. The graceful balance and harmony of this new old house gave Cara a new sensation of admiring pleasure--and yet she did not like it. It would be hard to tell what was the cause of the painful impression which prejudiced her mind--yet there it was. Her own mother--her dead mother--that visionary figure, half nurse, half goddess, which gives a quite visionary support and consolation to some motherless children, did not exist for Cara. She remembered how she had been sent off to the Hill when they went away to enjoy themselves, and how she had been sent off to the nursery when they sat talking to each other. It had been a happy home, and she had been petted and made much of by times--but this was what she recollected most clearly. And then there rose up before her, intensified by distance, that scene in her mother’s room, which she had never confided to any one. She resented this mystery that was in the past, which returned and wrapped her in a kind of mist when she came back. Why had not her parents been straightforward people, with no mysteries such, as Cara said to herself, she hated? Why was there a skeleton in the cupboard? All the things she had read in books about this had made Cara angry, and it vexed her to the heart to feel and know that there was one in her home. She had buried the secret so completely in her own bosom that it had made an aching spot all round it where it lay: like that bit of a garden which lies under a noxious shadow--like that bit of a field where a fire has been--was this place in her heart where her secret lay. She felt it, in all its force, when she came home. At the Hill there were no secrets; they lived with their windows open and their hearts, fearing no sudden appearance, no discovery. But here it seemed that the old trouble had been waiting all these years, till the girl went back who alone knew all about it, the father’s past and the mother’s past; and even the atmosphere of the long-shut-up house felt pernicious.