Neither Alice nor Ellen had seen each other, and heard but little of one another, for years. They had been friends in their early days. One, at least, had been a warm-hearted one. Both had been intimate; but there stood Alice to receive Ellen in the Cardinal's house at York Place; and there entered Ellen, Lord De Freston, and Latimer into the presence of one who had left upon their memories a chilling impression of hauteur, which formerly disgusted them, and did not, at that moment, allow of any softening sensation for better impression. Of all conjunctions, of all positions in which persons are unexpectedly placed, the memory of rivalship, in which personal dislike more than any honest contention or provocation had been the cause of disunion, is the most difficult feeling to disperse. Surprise was for the moment the expression of every face. Even Ellen's confessed it, and there was nothing pleasurable in the meeting. As to Alice, if an apparition had risen out of the earth, she could not have been more petrified with astonishment. Her cold, dark eye, wide open, and fixed upon Ellen, told, by its intensely rivetted stare, that it saw too much--more than it could bear; and yet it dwelt with hard, cruel, inquisitive firmness on the party before it. Is it possible to meet a person who hates you--literally hates you even unto death, and makes you know it by the very contempt of the eye--and not to feel a shudder at the enormity of hatred? Here stood, confronted in the forms of female self-possession, the dignity of the highest worldly pride, and the dignity of true humility. The one conscious of being introduced to the other by the very power to which alone that other had been known to bend. Here was Alice De Clinton, the proudest spirit that ever daughter of Eve possessed, and Ellen Latimer, at once the meekest and humblest, but, at the same time, the most faithful spirit, conscious of duty and love, met to confront each other by the order of the Cardinal, who, at the time he gave the invitation, was so engrossed with the affairs of his declining grandeur, that he forgot the opposing powers meeting in his mansion. 'Coming events cast their shadows before them.' The downfall of the favorite was precipitate enough; but the downfall of a portion of his domestic arrangements preceded it. The Cardinal had no motive in his heart but that which softened pride is apt to feel when it sees greatness fallen before it. Wolsey saw only Lord De Freston in distress, and his lovely daughter, the early companion of his youthful day, appealing to him for help. Through the vista of years gone by, he had never forgotten, though ambition had diverted his mind, the learned Ellen and Freston Tower; and though those years had, as an early dream, visited him with pleasure and with pain, yet they recurred to him now, in his decline, with a degree of softness and tenderness which positively subdued the grand and lofty-minded man from ambition to affection.