Not at all, I thought; but I did not say any thing. I felt almost guilty of having spied too curiously into that tender heart, and I was not going to speak of its secrets—hidden, Miss Matey believed, from all the world. I ushered Miss Pole into Miss Matilda’s little drawing-room; and then left them alone. But I was not surprised when Martha came to my bedroom door, to ask me to go down to dinner alone, for that missus had one of her bad headaches. She came into the drawing-room at tea-time; but it was evidently an effort to her; and, as if to make up for some reproachful feeling against her late sister, Miss Jenkyns, which had been troubling her all the afternoon, and for which she now felt penitent, she kept telling me how good and how clever Deborah was in her youth; how she used to settle what gowns they were to wear at all the parties (faint, ghostly ideas of dim parties far away in the distance, when Miss Matey and Miss Pole were young!) and how Deborah and her mother had started the benefit society for the poor, and taught girls cooking and plain sewing; and how Deborah had once danced with a lord; and how she used to visit at Sir Peter Arley’s, and try to remodel the quiet rectory establishment on the plans of Arley Hall, where they kept thirty servants; and how she had nursed Miss Matey through a long, long illness, of which I had never heard before, but which I now dated in my own mind as following the dismissal of the suit of Mr. Holbrook. So we talked softly and quietly of old times, through the long November evening. The next day Miss Pole brought us word that Mr. Holbrook was dead. Miss Matey heard the news in silence; in fact, from the account on the previous day, it was only what we had to expect. Miss Pole kept calling upon us for some expression of regret, by asking if it was not sad that he was gone: and saying, “To think of that pleasant day last June, when he seemed so well! And he might have lived this dozen years if he had not gone to that wicked Paris, where they are always having revolutions.” She paused for some demonstration on our part. I saw Miss Matey could not speak, she was trembling so nervously; so I said what I really felt: and after a call of some duration—all the time of which I have no doubt Miss Pole thought Miss Matey received the news very calmly—our visitor took her leave. But the effort at self-control Miss Matey had made to conceal her feelings—a concealment she practiced even with me, for she has never alluded to Mr. Holbrook again, although the book he gave her lies with her Bible on the little table by her bedside; she did not think I heard her when she asked the little milliner of Cranford to make her caps something like the Honorable Mrs. Jamieson’s, or that I noticed the reply, “But she wears widows’ caps, ma’am?” “Oh! I only meant something in that style; not widows’, of course, but rather like Mrs. Jamieson’s.”