What had they to do, the woman or the reflection, in this stately dwelling of the past?--brought here for a moment to pass across the surface of the mirror which had reflected so many things, to work unwitting and unwilling evil, and then to pass away--yet never to pass away having once been here. Diana hid her face in her hands, oppressed and bowed down by this visionary sense of intrusion, of harm, yet unreality. Not three months, not more than a moment in life: yet enough for so much to happen in, more important than many quiet years. So the great and the little mix and perplex each other, ever increasing the strange confusion of this world of shadow, till the brain turns round, and the heart grows sick. She rose up quickly, and threw out her hands, as if throwing something away. “This must not be,” she said aloud to herself; “this must not be.” And she gathered up from the table all those little tokens of personal presence which change the aspect of a place of habitation, and make it into the likeness of its tenants,--took up a shawl which had been thrown upon a sofa, a book which lay on an old cabinet, a little basket of odds and ends already collected. With a certain reverence, as we collect the possessions of the lately dead, she carried them all away. The room was left, when she closed the door, as it had been when she came in to it--the faded old furniture all ranged in its place, the great portrait looking down from the dimness of the old wall. Was it the same? A sweetness breathed in upon the air that had not been there before, a glimpse of flowers through the window, a greenness of leaves,--and on the carpet one little sprig of myrtle with its feathery globe of blossom, which had come from Sophy’s marriage-wreath, and had fallen as she went out from Diana’s hand. No more--yet something still.